‘Bring Them Down’ Review: In This Irish Revenge Drama, Life Is Nothing but Bloody Misery
The question will likely prickle the audience of Chris Andrews’ feature directorial debut “Bring Them Down” early and often: When, exactly, were these people fucked? Pardon our language, but if you balk at the use of the f-word to classify the miserable, bloody, meaningless lives of a pair of Irish sheep farmers and everyone around them — people who are well and truly fucked — than Andrews’ dismal Irish feature is not at all for you. Fans of dramas so dark and bitter that they make the most screwed-up parts of the Bible look funny and frisky? They’ll likely spark to what Andrews is dishing out here, but some questionable storytelling conceits eventually dilute even that power.
Things are already fraught when the film opens, as an SUV goes careening down an otherwise quiet Irish lane. Michael is driving. His mother (Susan Lynch) is next to him. His girlfriend Caroline (Grace Daly) is in the back. At first, the bumpy, jittery ride is fun, a lark, a way to pass the time. But when Michael’s mother tells her son — played in the film by Christopher Abbott, though we never see his face in this opening scene — that she’s leaving his father, the mood changes. Michael’s mother’s reasons for leaving are myriad, but they boil down to one key problem (and one that will pop back up, years later, in a different scene, and with just as much punch): “He terrifies me.” Michael doesn’t take the news well, but instead of telling his mother or Caroline what he’s feeling, he just pushes down harder on the accelerator, until he runs out of road.
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The brutal crash that follows is, like much else about “Bring Them Down,” inevitable in the sense that bad decisions breed bad outcomes. Do something reckless? You’re not going to like what happens next. In Michael’s case, his rage and confusion over his mother choosing to leave an abusive marriage pushed him to do something awful, horrible, maybe even evil. Years later, when the film picks back up, we see the full fallout of what happened: Caroline (now played by a scarred Nora-Jane Noone) has left Michael, married Gary (Paul Ready), and had Jack (Barry Keoghan). Michael’s father Ray (Colm Meaney) still mourns his wife, mostly because Michael has never told him what actually caused the crash that killed her, or what she said to her only son beforehand. He’s mostly confined to a chair, spending his days yelling at his son and waiting for painfully slow internet to download memes about sheep to his dusty desktop.
Michael’s days are spent alone, tending to his and Ray’s prize flock of sheep, who linger about the upper portion of the family’s (gorgeous, sweeping) land, which just so happens to abut Caroline and Gary’s own spread, where they tend their own sheep (and their angry young son, played as only Keoghan can). American-born Abbott does stellar work as Michael, not only breaking out a solid Irish accent, but often speaking Gaelic to boot. Abbott has long been one of our finest young actors — and yes, his turn in the remarkable “James White” should have earned much more attention — and Michael is a tough lift, a haunted man who has been utterly reduced to his secrets and rage.
Things are bad enough — combustible enough — and that’s before Gary and Jack ring up Ray and Michael and tell them that two of their rams have appeared on their side of the hill, dead. What this already-suspect discovery spawns isn’t at all surprising — here are people who are steeped in their misery and their resentment — though the lengths Andrews goes to show us just how depraved this long-simmering feud has made these men does shock. (Fair warning: The film is rife with horrific violence against animals.) Mostly, though, it does only that: Shock. Basic, trite, and without any hope for anything better ever happening.
The film’s title packs a double meaning: eventually, Michael decides he has to “bring them down” (read: bring his sheep down from their pasture high above the family’s property, if only for their own safety), oh, but that’s long after everyone involved has decided to bring the other people down, no matter the cost, no matter the pain, no matter the misery. By the end, we’re all in the muck, all at rock bottom, praying for the tragedy and inhumanity to end. It won’t.
Andrews initially cast Tom Burke and Paul Mescal in the film, and while that would have been an entirely different picture altogether, even that original casting hits on one of the odder elements of the story: Michael and Jack are not meant to be contemporaries here, and we’re expected to believe that Abbott could easily by Keoghan’s father. But with only six years between the actors’ actual birthdays, the casting comes with some confusion, and even if it’s meant to be a commentary on how these two are actually the same, victims of a cyclical pattern of violence that few people could ever hope to break free of.
Around the halfway mark, Andrews and co-writer Jonathan Hourigan quite literally flip the script, taking us back in time to see all of these events from Jack’s perspective. And while that storytelling choice does initially offer some important insights — the least of which being, “what the fuck is everyone’s fucking problem here?” — it eventually grows repetitive, stale, and far less powerful. What the fuck is everyone’s fucking problem here? At a certain point, it really doesn’t matter anymore. We’re all stuck here. When, exactly, was this all so fucked? From the start, and no one seems particularly interested in moving past that.
Grade: C+
“Bring Them Down” premiered at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. MUBI will release it at a later date.
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