Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Christopher Andrews
Starring: Christopher Abbott, Barry Keoghan, Colm Meaney, Nora-Jane Noone, Paul Ready, Susan Lynch
While it's set in modern day Ireland, writer/director
Christopher Andrews' feature debut
Bring Them Down boasts the sort of story you might stumble
across while leafing through a volume of Celtic mythology. Two warring clans
living on opposite sides of a hill with a woman simultaneously drawing them
together while tearing them apart: such is the stuff of legend. It all leads
to the over the top violence that delighted me as an impressionable
six-year-old in my Irish history class, but such extreme bloodletting jars
with the gritty realism of the piece.
Andrews' film shares a similar setup with the Icelandic drama
Rams, pitting two sheep farmers on a deadly course of conflict in a windswept
landscape. Two decades after killing his mother (Susan Lynch) and
leaving his then girlfriend Caroline (Nora Jane Noone) facially
scarred by his reckless driving, Michael (Christopher Abbott) lives a
lonely life running the family sheep farm for his invalid father Ray (Colm Meaney
in another of his now signature gruff Irish patriarch roles). In the
intervening years Caroline has gotten married to Gary (Paul Ready)
and raised a troubled teenage son in Jack (Barry Keoghan, still
somehow convincing as a teen in his thirties).
Gary and Ray have been at odds over the former's attempts to build holiday
homes in the area, with Ray refusing him access to his land. The dichotomy
between the set in his ways Ray and the ruthlessly ambitious Gary is
represented by Ray and Michael speaking their native Irish at home, a
language Gary and his family don't understand. There's further animosity
between Gary and Michael, with Gary suspecting Caroline still has feelings
for her old boyfriend (it's never mentioned, but we can't help but wonder if
Jack is really Michael's son).
When Jack claims to have found two of Michael's dead rams on his family's
side of the hill and immediately disposed of the bodies for fear of disease,
Michael smells a rat. His suspicions are confirmed when he finds Gary and
Jack attempting to sell the rams at the local mart, leading to a public
confrontation, with Gary refusing to return the sheep. This sets in motion a
chain of events that leads to the inevitable bloodshed in the
woolshed.
Bring Them Down might be described as a contemporary western,
and Abbott's Michael is exactly the sort of taciturn protagonist with a
shady past you might find strapping on their old pistol for one last duel at
dawn. Abbott's handsome yet sad-sack features make him an ill-fit for
traditional leading man roles, but he fits into the role of the eternally
tormented Michael, and his dark features could easily be a product of the
Irish west. Abbott gets around any accent issues by mumbling through his
minimal lines, and he does an impressive job of handling the Irish language
dialogue. It's clearly guilt that has kept Michael at home, and when he
cradles his dying sheepdog in his arms, Abbott's teary face tells us he's
lost the only friend he had left and now no longer has anything to keep him
sleepwalking through his life.
We believe Michael as a character until a certain point when the narrative
takes a shocking turn into Peckinpah territory with an act of violence so
grisly it threatens to be cartoonish. A jump back in time gives us a shift
in POV and reminds us that there are two sides to every story, but once we
catch up to the point of Michael's violent act the movie never finds its
footing again. Parallels are drawn between the path Jack finds himself on
and the recklessness of Michael's past youth, but the film can't find a more
interesting way to draw these two men together than a clichéd bloody final
act. We can't help but wish Bring Them Down was more
interested in Noone's Caroline, the true victim in this whole scenario,
rather than simply focussing on the men who caused her scars, both physical
and emotional.
Bring Them Down is in UK/ROI
cinemas from February 7th.
