The reason Remmick sang "The Rocky Road to Dublin" in Sinners

In his film Sinners (2025), Coogler tells a heart-wrenching tale of horror ranging over multi-faceted reflection on a colonizer’s identity. His work reveals a scar the colonizer leaves while also exploring cultural identity, art, and identity theft within coexisting cultures.

One of the film’s most sinister moments is motivated by villain Remmick, who, in the able hands of Jack O’Connell, displays unnerving charm interspersed with 19th century Irish folk songs “The Rocky Road to Dublin.”

This excerpt is more than just a break in the score; it's foundational for understanding a multi-faceted character who has suffered - it shows why they are the way they are, what motivates them, and the socio-cultural trauma they bear. It does this while drawing profound parallels between Irish and Black American novels.

Remmick’s Irish identity unveiled

For most of the film, Remmick conceals his origins from everyone, impersonating a North Carolinian with very little trace of where he really comes from. This does shift when he performs “The Rocky Road to Dublin,” a song about an Irishman’s difficult journey out of his homeland to England and the promise of opportunity.

Remick's Irish accent makes a first appearance in this scene, indicating for the first time that his roots are quite different from what he suggests.

The song speaks of relentless bigotry, xenophobia, and an enduring battle which is bound to conflict with Remmick's own lost culture. Much like the song's narrator who suffers mockery for their accent amidst strange lands, Remmick is marked by exile and rejection. It shifts him from a perspective of a simple antagonist to a historical figure whose identity has been heavily altered by forces beyond his will.

Music as a mirror: cultural theft & possession

It’s not merely blood or power that draws Remmick to Sammie, the brilliant Black musician at the center of Sinners. It’s music. He seeks to have what Sammie possesses: the spirit, the heritage, and the craft. The film employs this wish to underline the history of Black culture being exploited, profited from, and consumed by white audiences.

However, Remmick is not solely a representation of cultural theft; he also represents how the marginalized turn into oppressors. His rendering of an Irish folk tune while encircled by newly turned vampires performing an eerie sing-along and dance reveals the extent to which he clings to culture – and plans to exploit it.

The dance of defiance

While performing a traditional Irish dance, Remmick starts singing, which serves as another powerful symbol. Irish music and dance was suppressed under British occupation. At this juncture in the narrative, his dance becomes a subdued expression of defiance, a restoration of an identity that has been silenced.

This multi-faceted symbolism reinforces that Remmick, similar to many colonized individuals, takes pride in an identity that was violently taken from him. But unlike Sammie, who uplifts through her artwork, connects people, and builds bridges, Remmick takes culture to viciously wield it as a tool of power.

A sinister reflection of shared pain

The Rocky Road to Dublin does not serve merely as Remmick’s origin tale. It serves as a confluence of narratives. While the film does not equate the experiences of Irish and Black Americans, it draws parallels with caution. Both groups endured displacement, cultural erasure, and exploitation. And Sinners does not shy away from such complexities.

Remmick recounts worse – being forced to abandon his belief and accept Christianity – a reflection of devastating cultural imposition that colonized people endure. Later, he even claims that he can lead the survivors of the club to fight the KKK if they join him as vampires, blurring allyship and exploitation.

The monster beneath the melody

Sinners keeps reminding the audience of Remmick’s backstory and paints his picture along the lines of his suffering mirroring that of the club’s patrons, but still manages to show what he is – a predator. This empathy stops at the point obsession begins. One can say, he expresses the longing for fellowship by means of dominance, the need for redemption through domination.

The song The Rocky Road to Dublin holds particular relevance to the film, more as a slogan than just a piece of art. It closes the gap of a sophisticated personality deeply traumatized and afflicted seeking to take control, rewriting his future using means that don’t belong to him. Through this, Sinners forces the viewers to examine the consequences of unchanneled suffering and the deeply rooted monstrous urges it creates.