A few key components of Christopher Andrews’ Bring Them Down, his full-length directorial debut, may bring to mind another small-scale Irish drama that recently brought acclaim: with its story of a steadily escalating feud between two men set in rural Ireland — and with the presence of actor Barry Keoghan — Bring Them Down is easy to compare with Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin. Yet while McDonagh’s film was a dialogue-driven, melancholy meditation on long-simmering resentments that can grow in a close-knit community, Andrews’ film is something grislier. The film’s primary conflict is a violent spiral between a pair of fathers and sons based on misunderstanding and emotional repression, lasting years and leaving extensive collateral damage. Andrews seems to aim for a parable that critiques cycles of masculine violence, but the result is too thin in characterization and narrative development to read as anything more than a repetitive exercise in misery.
The film, written by Andrews and Jonathan Hourigan, initially centers a taciturn shepherd, Michael (Christopher Abbott), who lives with his disabled, verbally abusive father Ray (Colm Meaney). Michael’s life has been defined by a death he caused years before, depicted in the tense opening scene: when his mother (Susan Lynch) told him in the car that she would soon leave his father, Michael, apparently in a state of rage or panic, drove the car off the side of the road. The accident also injured his girlfriend, Caroline (a nuanced Nora-Jane Noone, and played as a teenager by Grace Daly), who is now married to a rival farmer, Gary (Paul Ready).
The primary conflict is set into motion when Gary calls Ray to inform him he found two dead rams belonging to Ray and Michael on his property. Michael is then told by Gary and Caroline’s son, Jack (Barry Keoghan), that he was the one who found them, following which he disposed of them due to signs of disease. Yet when Michael goes to buy two new rams, he finds the apparently dead rams alive and well, with Gary and Jack attempting to sell them. This act of deception leads to steadily increasing rage on both sides, causing a cascading series of small acts of violence. This family rivalry culminates in Michael’s discovery that his entire flock has been decimated, which he believes to be the responsibility of a contractor who works for Gary — the legs of each of his sheep have been cut off, and in an excruciating scene, Michael slits their throats one by one to put them out of their misery. Encouraged by Ray, Michael then pursues a final act of revenge.
This relentlessly bleak narrative moves at a straightforward clip, yet the plot unexpectedly resets to the inciting incident about halfway through the film. Andrews then shows the same series of events from Jack’s perspective. We learn that, before Michael and Ray’s rams were stolen, Ray didn’t allow Gary and Jack to drive through his property after a fallen bridge left them stranded — Ray was disdainful of their current work building vacation rentals on their property, and he had no intention of aiding them. This vindictive act, then, is the spark for the cycle of retribution from Jack’s perspective. He steals the rams himself, then later cuts off the legs of the flock with his cousin to make a profit from a shady meat supplier.
The repeated narrative is an artistic risk that Andrews fails to successfully pull off. While the director maintains a consistent sense of tension and surprise throughout the first act, buoyed by Abbott’s ability to project inner turmoil, the repetition of each significant plot beat in the second act completely removes any sense of narrative intrigue. Compounding this problem is Keoghan’s unconvincing performance. While Abbott and Keoghan both play essentially two-dimensional characters, functioning more as symbols of masculine anger and revenge than fully realized individuals, Keoghan proves to be less capable of filling in the gaps of his characterization. Apparently playing a teenager, the actor is visibly too old for the role — he reads as roughly five years younger than the actors playing his parents, a casting problem which causes unnecessary confusion as to what their exact familial relationship is — and he affects a childlike slouch and a whiny vocal tone to compensate, thus calling attention to his performance’s artifice. With a shallow characterization and stilted performance dominating this second section of the film, there is little for the viewer to latch on to beyond the upsettingly visceral sounds of sheep being mutilated.
Aspects of Bring Them Down are well-crafted: Nick Cooke’s crisp cinematography casts the craggy grandeur of the Irish countryside in an effectively gloomy light, and composer Hannah Peel’s percussive score imbues the film’s tensest scenes with a propulsive dread. Andrews’ compositions are likewise carefully crafted, and in several key scenes, he drives steadily accumulated sources of conflict toward powerful climaxes. Yet by the inevitable final showdown between Michael and Ray, Bring Them Down, a film both over-determined and under-developed, has already exhausted itself.
DIRECTOR: Chris Andrews; CAST: Christopher Abbott, Barry Keoghan, Nora Jane Noone, Colm Meaney; DISTRIBUTOR: MUBI; IN THEATERS: February 7; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 46 min.
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