A brutally violent directorial debut, Christopher Andrews’ rural Irish drama “Bring Them Down” veers between pitch-black humor and pervading melancholy. A tale of fathers, sons, and mutilated sheep, it toys with narrative point of view in “Rashomon”-like fashion, but keeps pressing questions of masculinity and cycles of sadness hovering just out of view. Fittingly, like its emotionally stunted male characters, it doesn’t confront these notions head on, but lets them quietly build in the form of a simmering blood feud that feels all-encompassing in the moment, but upon taking a step back, reveals a pitiable quality.
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A brief but distressing prologue — told through alternating chaos and silence — reveals a car crash. Michael (Christopher Abbott), upon finding out that his mother had planned to leave his father, sped off in a fit of uncontrollable emotion and swerved off the road. His mother, in the passenger’s seat, was killed on impact. His then-girlfriend Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone) was in the car as well, and was left with a pronounced scar down the left side of her face, a focused embodiment of the way women bear the brunt of men’s unchecked rage.
Years later, Michael lives with his demanding, paraplegic father, Ray (Colm Meaney), whose ram farm he tends to day and night. Caroline, as it happens, has now married Michael’s neighbor and competitor, Gary (Paul Ready), with whom she has a teenage son, Jack (Barry Keoghan). The weight of past traumas already leaves tension between the two families, which is only exacerbated when two of Michael’s sheep are found dead on Gary’s property. Before long, things escalate and cause further suspicion, when many more of Michael’s livestock are badly maimed, leaving him to put them down, one by one.
By unveiling this silent storm from Michael’s perspective, “Bring Them Down” creates a disconcerting aura about Gary and Jack — accompanied by a thumping, off-kilter score — as they act neighborly towards Michael in one moment, while approaching him with an icy chill in the next. Further complicating matters is the fact that Caroline still approaches Michael with a kindly demeanor, and a warmth she no longer seems to have for her husband. Michael, however, can’t help but be reminded of his actions each time he looks at her face.
Who exactly is responsible for each new violent turn (and more importantly, why) comes to light gradually, but with intention. For much of the movie’s first half, Andrews sends Michael journeying through night-time landscapes — which obscure violent imagery before revealing it at specific, gut-churning moments — in order to either gather his flock, or enact revenge on a father-son duo who seem downright sociopathic. However, when the film doubles back and unfurls new layers to its seeming antagonist, Michael begins to come off equally unhinged, plunging all three men (four, if you count Ray) into a deeply dispiriting and at times bleakly funny tale in which bloodshed is all but inevitable.
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Although no character ever expresses any religious or superstitious beliefs — then again, as withholding men with stiff upper lips they don’t express much in words to begin with — the initial premise of “Bring Them Down” feels almost cursed. Michael’s sheep are no doubt innocent victims in something larger, but the looming sense that he might deserve this punishment for his past sins (or at least, might believe he does) is inescapable, imbuing the film with a purgatorial quality. Meanwhile, the pressures placed on him by his father, and placed on Jack by Gary, set Abbot and Keoghan’s characters on a collision course, and draw from both of them quietly troubled performances, which occasionally build to disquieting outbursts. Both actors are utterly fascinating to watch, and manage to play with vastly different modes within the same narrow framework, depending on whose perspective the film reveals.
Andrews carves out a distinct space for implication in a story that ought to seem literal and straightforward, making the audience wonder (as the characters might, even subconsciously) about unconfronted truths. Ray, for instance, is unaware of Michael’s part in his wife’s death, though he often laments her passing out loud in front of him, as though he were challenging him in some form. Similarly, Caroline’s crumbling marriage and her remaining affinity for Michael can’t help but make one wonder whose son Jack really is. This question is never broached explicitly, but it takes on a greater thematic significance, in the context of the film’s father-son musings. Jack and Michael both becomes victims of familial circumstance, and of each other’s selfishness, as though they were a key centerpiece in this tale of violence and hatred passed down.
When things finally erupt between them, “Bring Them Down” pulls back on its heightened, revenge-movie visual parlance, and instead robs the two families’ brewing conflict of any discernible allure. The movie’s substance lies in its lack of stylization in its most violent moments. This make its vicious characters seem pathetic by the end, as though the roles they were pushed into by forces greater than themselves — their fathers, their lineage, their financial circumstances — have all but reduced them to squabbling children. It’s grimly funny, and hilariously sad.
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