Bring Them Down: B-a-a-a-d Times in Rural Ireland
By Liam Lacey
Rating: C
A kind of Western, at least one set in western Ireland, Christopher Andrews’ debut film Bring Them Down sees two families of farmers locked in a cycle of vengeance that takes a terrible toll, and does no favours for their sheep, either.
Thick with dank atmosphere and well-acted with a cast that includes Colm Meaney and Barry Keoghan, it’s a drama about angry men with mommy issues that starts with a slow burn and ends up to its ears in gore.
American actor Christopher Abbott stars as the handsome, haunted Michael, who has a drizzle of grey in his beard, and who tends a sheep herd. He also takes care of and speaks in Irish to his curmudgeonly disabled dad, Ray (Meaney) who is “waiting for his new knees” and needs Michael to carry him about.
Ray asserts that his family has been tending sheep on this land for the past 500 years. Still, centuries of agricultural boredom is no excuse to go full Sam Peckinpah.
The sad-faced Michael is paying penance for his past. The prologue scene begins with a car crash, in which Michael is driving in reckless anger after his mother (Susan Lynch) tells him she is leaving his abusive father. The crash kills the mother and leaves Michael’s teenaged girlfriend Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone), who was riding in the backseat, with a long scar on her cheek.
Years later, the now-mature Caroline is living next door, unhappily married to neighbour Gary (Paul Ready). Paul has got himself deep in the bottle and in debt pursuing a holiday home development project.
Gary resents Michael because he suspects Caroline still has feelings for her old beau and, more practically, because Michael’s dad Ray refuses to allow his neighbour access to the land he wants to develop. Some lowdown sheep rustlin’ ensues and soon, we have the equivalent of a two-family range war.
This isn’t entirely predictable. There’s a mid-film rewind which involves a perspective switch, from Michael to Caroline’s twitchy, pitiable teenaged son Jack (Keoghan) who is also troubled about parental domestic turmoil.
Possibly, Jack is Michael’s son, an idea that is teased but not made explicit. Trying to prove his manhood, Jack has got himself involved an idiotic black market mutton scheme, and one ba-a-a-d action leads to another.
As a parable about the challenges of economic change and wounded male pride, this cursed family drama offers some psychological motivations but mostly it feels calculated as a calling-card film, designed to show what the director might do with a Hollywood budget.
On its own modest terms, this blood-soaked drama feels extreme and more than a little absurd.
Bring Them Down. Written and directed by Christopher Andrews. Starring Christopher Abbott, Barry Keoghan, Colm Meany, Nora-Jane Noone, and Paul Ready. In theatres February 7. Click here to watch the trailer.