Bring Them Down, 2024.
Written and Directed by Chris Andrews.
Starring Christopher Abbott, Barry Keoghan, Colm Meaney, Nora-Jane Noone, Paul Ready, Susan Lynch, Conor MacNeill, Youssef Quinn, Aaron Heffernan, Adam Behan, and Diarmuid de Faoite.
SYNOPSIS:
An Irish shepherding family thrust into battle on several fronts: internal strife, hostility within the family, rivalry with another farmer. Paternalism, heritage, and the generational trauma cycle through the cultural prism of Ireland.
Writer/director Chris Andrews’ Bring Them Down is bleakly exhilarating on its Rashomon-inspired collision course of tragedy. In other words, it will bring down one’s mood as well.
Centered on neighboring Irish shepherding families (forced to share the only hill), the disappearance/theft of a couple of rams is as much a firestarter for lingering personal drama as much as it is an act of interfering with each other’s business. For Christopher Abbott’s Michael, it’s another blow to his already struggling farm, especially since the neighbors, which are comprised of frequently arguing married couple Gary (Paul Ready) and Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone) alongside their young adult son Jack (Barry Keoghan) who doesn’t know how to handle or react to that increasing hostility and verbal abuse from his father that also extends to lashing out at him, have no intentions of giving the animals back. Michael’s badly injured and disabled father, Ray (Colm Meaney), who spends the majority of the film sitting in a standard chair until they can one day get medical assistance, shouts for his son to take action.
Complicating the dynamic here is that Michael once dated Caroline, that is until a defining act of nondirect violence unintentionally left his mother dead and her most likely scared to be around him anymore. Rather than resorting to the cheap screenwriting tactic of a redemptive arc, Chris Andrews isn’t using this to provoke a story of forgiveness. If anything, it’s the opposite: as the other family continues to mess with his already shaky operation and push him to the limit, that violent nature could once again erupt.
Hard times have fallen on everyone, eking out an existence on this island, which, as previously mentioned, has further brought whatever happy life Gary and Caroline once had to a resentful standstill. As such, Jack finds himself acting out, trying to prove his worth to his father and trying to save that marriage. Meanwhile, Michael doesn’t seem to have anything left to lose; no love is lost for his father.
With expansive cinematography, Nick Cooke captures the vastness of this island, the animal trails and the hills, and the loneliness of this life while also getting up close and dirty when it comes to brutality to both humans and animals (there is a shocking amount of unflinching animal cruelty here that, while intended to make a point, will not be for the eyes and ears of everyone), this is a film enriched by its time and place.
These are characters acting out of desperation, toxic masculinity, and self-worth. Chris Andrews also smartly applies the narrative technique of jumping back to the beginning to tell key events from another perspective as a means to add more depth to their motives and actions. That’s not to say that Bring Them Down is much more than a thriller about two shepherding families with personal conflict who can’t stand each other, but that the grim nastiness is in service of the characters. It’s a mean-spirited delight boasting Christopher Abbott and Barry Keoghan impressing again in their respective modes of simmering intensity and emotional fragility.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association, Critics Choice Association, and Online Film Critics Society. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews and follow my BlueSky or Letterboxd
