Christopher Abbott and Barry Keoghan Are Phenomenal in ‘Bring Them Down’
TORONTO—A spiritual companion piece to The Banshees of Inisherin that features another riveting performance from Barry Keoghan, Bring Them Down is an edgy small-scale tale that reverberates with epic tensions.
The story of a warring pair in the countryside whose livestock squabble boils over into violence, Christopher Andrews’ directorial debut—which premiered Sept. 8 at the Toronto International Film Festival—is a rugged and ragged affair whose suspense comes not only from its escalating-stakes action but from its charged performances and severe formal proximity to its protagonists. Taut and mournful, it’s a lament for the mistakes made in anger, the wounds that fail to heal, and the past that never truly seems to be past at all.
In an unspecified rural patch of Ireland, Michael (Christopher Abbott) manages the family’s flock of sheep and rams now that his father Ray (Colm Meaney) is disabled and largely confined to the chair in front of his archaic computer.
Returning home one evening, Michael discovers that their gate is busted, after which Ray hands him the full bottle of urine that he uses to relieve himself. Things are broken and dysfunctional in this quiet outpost, and that situation is exacerbated by a call that Ray receives from neighboring sheep farmer Gary (Paul Ready), who tells him that they found two of Michael’s rams dead on the hill. Upon visiting Gary’s place, Michael runs into former flame Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone) and her twentysomething son Jack (Keoghan), the latter of whom informs him that the beasts appeared to be sick and he disposed of them in the slurry.
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All of this is preceded by a prologue in which an unseen Michael speeds dangerously down the road as his mother Peggy (Susan Lynch) and a young Caroline (Grace Daly) plead with him to be slow down. Peggy’s fragmented comments indicate that she’s leaving Ray, just as present-day tidbits indicate that the subsequent car wreck caused by Michael cost him Peggy and scarred and alienated Caroline, who’s now married to Gary.
When Michael goes to the mart to purchase new rams, he hears that someone has been cutting the legs off sheep. Worse, he discovers that Jack and Gary are trying to sell the very two rams of his that they claimed were dead. A heated stand-off ensues, with Michael’s eyes filled with blank rage as he stands face-to-face, body-to-body with Gary in the pen like an animal ready to fight.
Andrews’ camera is perpetually affixed to Michael’s face and body, attuning Bring Them Down to his resentment, self-loathing, sorrow, and fury, the last of which is—as suggested by intolerant radio reports and an offhand racist comment at the mart—endemic in this community. In the immediate aftermath of this confrontation, Michael is pursued on the road by Gary and Jack, whose truck topples when they fail to handle a sharp turn.
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Despite the animosity between them, Michael rescues his tormentors from the vehicle and gets them home. For his troubles, he receives an earful from Gary, who goads Michael with talk about his responsibility for his mother’s death and the fact that Ray doesn’t know that the calamity was brought about by Peggy’s desire to leave him. Michael suffers this with a stone face, but he seethes over these insults.
To remedy his situation, Michael decides to bring the family’s flock down from the hill for the first time in 500 years. Yet doing so doesn’t provide him with the financial relief he needs, as Bring Them Down spirals further into tit-for-tat mayhem. At its midway point, the film rewinds to replay its tale from the perspective of Jack, who turns out to be not simply an antagonistic brute but a young man who, like his adversary, is deeply traumatized by the fear of parental separation, paternal cruelty, and economic ruin.
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Andrews parallels without resorting to clunky one-to-one echoes, allowing the similarities between the two men to manifest via his curt plotting and harried aesthetics, marked by handheld cinematography that places a premium on sticking tight to his subjects’ faces, and a Hannah Peel score of nerve-wracking percussion.
Bring Them Down has an innate feel for its unforgiving milieu and its hard-bitten inhabitants, its authenticity felt in everything from its gorgeous if unsentimental panoramas of the Irish countryside to the Gaelic spoken by Michael and Ray (and the smile on the former’s face when he hears Caroline also use it, unlike Jack and Gary). The film is rooted in this region’s unique customs, traditions, and dynamics, and while it’s light on dialogue and often sparsely populated, it moves at the pulse-pounding pace of a thriller. There’s doom hanging over everything and everyone in its frame, and Andrews prioritizes that mood over italicizing his larger concerns, which slowly spill out from the corners of his central drama.
The epicenter of Bring Them Down’s intensity, ultimately, is Abbott. With a far-off glare that’s darkened by anguish, ire, and desperation, the star proves an amazingly formidable presence, his every silent action and reaction exuding a messy tangle of emotions. Abbott is as good as he’s ever been (which is saying something), and he’s exceptionally complemented by Keoghan, whose Jack is another of the actor’s ramshackle, unruly Irish blokes.
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In contrast to his The Banshees of Inisherin character, however, Keoghan’s latest pitiful loner channels his unhappiness not into suicidal despair but, instead, into reckless brutality, and that course of action plunges the film into a climactic showdown between its main characters, who appear fated to perpetuate the cycle of violence that’s defined their lives.
“You can do whatever you want,” says Caroline to her son, but Bring Them Down implies that, for Jack, Michael, and others trapped in this enclave, that’s not really true, since they’ve been corrupted—and stunted—by the ugly lessons learned at the feet of their fathers and by the lingering agony of their experiences in fractured households. Like the mutilated sheep that dot this picturesque landscape, these men are cut off at the knees and the best they can do, tragically (if, also, hopefully), is find a way to shuffle their way to safety, together.
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