Bring Them Down Review

In Christopher Andrews’ debut feature Bring Them Down, it’s a universal story, one you could slot into almost any century or setting. Two families with a feud simmering under the surface, which suddenly escalates when one family steals something of huge value from the other. Attempts to get it back fail, communication breaks down and all roads lead to violent confrontation, with inevitable and profound effects on both sides.

The setting is rural Ireland and the families are both sheep farmers. Michael (Christopher Abbott) lives with his truculent father Ray (Colm Meaney), whose abuse of his now late wife hangs like a dark cloud over both men. She was killed in a car crash when Michael was at the wheel and his then-girlfriend Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone), who was in the back seat, was left with permanent injuries. Caroline is now married to another farmer, Gary (Paul Ready), and their son Jack (Barry Keoghan) sees Michael as a blot on his personal landscape. That their farms are adjacent to each other and Gary has his eyes on a certain piece of land just makes matters worse.

MORE: CHECK OUT OUR EXCLUSIVE CHAT WITH THE FILM’S DIRECTOR, CHRISTOPHER ANDREWS, HERE!

Against fierce competition, Andrews scooped Best Debut Director at the BIFAs last year with a film that demonstrates a great deal of potential, despite being hampered by a certain unevenness. What never lets up, though, is the dour, grim atmosphere, one of the reasons for Bring Them Down’s grip. The protagonists are neither villain nor victim: instead, they’re all as bad as each other in their individual ways and there’s no room to feel compassion with any of them. Even when the film’s point of view changes from Michael to Jack, that unforgiving attitude is consistent, with some scenes especially upsetting and gruesome. Swop the sheep for cattle and you’d be among the wildest of Wild West, and the strong, almost primeval percussion soundtrack from Hannah Peel reinforces it.

For all its universality, the film boils down to toxic masculinity, with intransigent, angry men to the forefront and its solitary woman resorting to similar tactics to try and prevent the inevitable. It doesn’t work, of course, and while the all-pervasive gloom comes risks being repellent, the cast keeps your attention well and truly locked in. The combination of Abbott as the doomed Michael and Keoghan as his fiery, off-the-rails nemesis is brilliantly balanced and almost irresistible. Most of Abbott’s scenes are also in the local Irish dialect, something he makes look ridiculously easy, even in the face of native speakers in the cast.

The blood in Bring Them Down is most definitely bad and there’s no respite for its characters. For the audience, the absence of any lightness in tone means the end result, for all its strengths, is just too narrow in its vision to make it wholly satisfying. But this is the start for Andrews, and it’s still an impressive one.