Director: Christopher Andrews
Writer: Christopher Andrews, Jonathan Hournigan
Stars: Christopher Abbott, Barry Keoghan, Nora-Jane Noone
Synopsis: An Irish shepherding family thrust into battle on several fronts: internal strife, hostility within the family, rivalry with another farmer.
Christopher Andrews’ furious, gripping directorial debut Bring Them Down is far from being a car crash in execution and quality, but it’s certainly fitting that it begins with one. Before the film’s opening titles appear against a foreboding, stormy landscape that feels entwined with the tone that persists over the course of the next 106 minutes, we see a car careening down a dusty back road somewhere in western Ireland. Based on how cinematographer Nick Cooke’s camera cuts between the vehicle’s passengers addressing someone who is behind the wheel, we understand that Michael (Christopher Abbott) is driving, and doing so in a steadily increasing fit of rage. That’s because his mother (Susan Lynch) has informed him that she intends to leave his father, and thus Michael, as she can no longer take the darkness buried within the former. Despite her best efforts to calm him from the backseat, Michael’s girlfriend Caroline (Grace Daly) can’t extinguish his own internal fire, one that is automatically doused in kerosene the second it’s lit. Unable to control his anger, Michael resorts to pressing his foot until the gas pedal reaches the floor. It’s a far more dangerous iteration of a man’s tendency to punch his pillow in an effort to release their inner wrath, and its outcome carries consequences that can’t possibly compare to the mutable dents briefly left in a beaten cushion.
Michael’s careless conduct on the road results in one death and two serious injuries, which isn’t a spoiler so much as it is an important footnote that the story returns to, a pivotal prologue that fuels much of the ire donned by the film like a proudly-earned scar. Bring Them Down’s early tragedy – its first and least bloody of the many that follow – has the qualities of a gravitational pull, one that holds Michael over life’s burning coals, but perhaps it only seems that way because of everything else it caused. Caroline (played by Nora-Jane Noone once the film jumps forward in time to the present day) has left Michael for his neighbor and sheep-farming rival Gary (Paul Ready), with whom she shares a son named Jack (Barry Keoghan). While she has seemingly moved on, Michael still lives in his childhood home with his father, Ray (Colm Meaney), an incapacitated old man who wasn’t in the accident that killed his wife and Michael’s mother, but still carries the pain from its outcome along with a litany of ailments that keep him confined to a chair. He can no longer work on the farm, leaving Michael to deal with duties meant for two able-bodied people. When Ray does feel the need to get involved, Michael must literally carry his father on his back from one point to another.
These circumstances tend to leave Michael, and Michael alone, to deal with any conflicts that arise, and the one that spurs the events of Bring Them Down is merely the beginning. While it might sound trite, the act of stealing a few prized sheep from another farmer’s flock is no small snipe in a modest community, and when Jack does exactly that, Michael’s immediate response, as is natural in his circumstances, is one of hostility. He gets in Jack’s face, which leads to Gary getting in Michael’s, and so on, though these men aren’t known solely for their barks. Their bites, in fact, are more reminiscent of snarling chomps, those that create gashes in the hands of the recipient, and each party here ends up on the receiving end of Andrews’ plethora of pain at least once during the remainder of his debut’s runtime. Make no mistake: This is a frigid film, one that is followed by a storm cloud as it unfolds, and while it isn’t always pouring rain on its characters, the threat remains.
Thankfully, Andrews possesses the wherewithal as a filmmaker to commit to his film’s dark tone in a calculated manner that doesn’t make it come off as trauma porn, never affording it the opportunity to revel in its inherent anguish. Instead, Bring Them Down is a heartbreakingly grim piece of work that examines – buzzword alert – toxic masculinity without taking a side in the debate, insofar as there is much of an argument regarding how productive any semblance of toxicity can be in the undying conflict between competitors. It wields a bloodsoaked blade, not as a toy, but as a reminder of what can come of your actions when they go unchecked. “Unfiltered” may be an even more applicable term, as most of the horrifying acts each of Andrews’ characters commit seem meant to be accompanied by gasps and groans from the film’s audience, a verbal acknowledgement that these broken men should really think before they act.
But that wouldn’t leave much room neither for the dizzyingly dour proceedings to carry the weight that they ultimately do, nor for the squabble at the film’s center to feel like its circumstances are of the life-or-death variety. What helps is Andrews’ attention to his locale and its specificities, from the look of the landscapes to the Gaelic tongue that Michael and Ray tend to communicate through. (While Abbott was born in Connecticut, he manages to convincingly inhabit the tortured soul of an Irish lad; the native Keoghan naturally fits right in.) While a lesser work operating in a similar tonal register might reek of desperation as it attempts to remain ruthless for nearly two hours, Andrews and his cast use their surroundings to their benefit, the muddy fields and small homes representing the confines of an inescapable wartime reality. While war can end in one side’s surrender and limited bloodshed, that’s rare in comparison to the many bouts that come to blows with only one emerging victorious from the crumpled pile of bodies victorious. It’s a kill or be killed world, Bring Them Down argues. Mercifully, it never picks a side, and doesn’t ask us to, either.
