Chuck Wilson
The debut feature from filmmaker Christopher Andrews, Bring Them Down, is an unsettling movie about miserable people. But the film’s extraordinary lead actors — Christopher Abbott and Barry Keoghan — are so fearless in their willingness to descend into the mad muck of it all that moviegoers with an instinct to dash for the exit when onscreen events turn disturbingly violent are likely to hold on for one scene more, and then another. At the movies, we can trust great actors to show us that which we do not usually wish to see.
Abbott plays Michael, who’s spent his life herding sheep on an expansive West Ireland farm alongside his father, Ray (Colm Meaney), who insists on speaking in Irish Gaelic and who sees life on the farm as the continuation of a 500-year legacy. He is a rigorous man who has probably never said a kind word in his life.
From a distance the hilly landscape is gorgeous, but up close, daily life is muddy and hard. We sense that Michael might have chosen to spend all his days here as penance for having driven his mother off the road to her death when he was a teenager, in a car accident that serves as the film’s rather awkwardly staged prologue.
Michael’s teenage girlfriend, Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone), was riding in the backseat that day, and now, 20-plus years later, she’s living on the farm adjacent to Michael, with her husband, Gary (Paul Ready), and son, Jack (Keoghan). Inept at sheep farming, Gary and Jack envy Michael and Ray their fine flock, and resent when they are forced to turn to them for assistance. (It doesn’t help that Ray relishes their vulnerability.)
One morning, Gary calls to report that Jack found two of Michael and Ray’s rams dead on their property, but later, Michael spots them among Gary’s flock, sparking a macho staredown that ends in a draw. “What you gonna do?” Gary asks Michael. “Kill me like you killed your mommy?” Events escalate in the days ahead, leading to a nightmarish moment, late on a moonlit night, when Michael and his sheepdog find that their herd has been viciously mutilated and left to die. A lifelong farmer, Michael wails once and then sets about the grim business of putting the sheep out of their misery, only to find an even more dreadful task awaiting him nearby.
This is the sequence (with others to come) in which the urge to leave early might descend on viewers, but Andrews holds tight on Abbott’s face, which is lit by a miner’s headlamp and heartbreaking in its exhausted, wracked grief. Abbott is an actor of such deep currents that he draws us close, even in a scene that’s almost too sad to bear.
Enraged, Michael’s father sends his son out for vengeance. From there, things get even more violently out of hand, only for the director to stop, let the screen go black, and then begin the entire story again from Jack’s point of view. This is irritating, and then revelatory.
Jack’s a brute in the making and hangs out with a truly rotten apple (Aaron Heffernan), but he’s tender with his mother and when he’s in a truck accident with Gary, runs his hand along his unconscious father’s back and whispers, like a scared kid, “Daddy”? Like Ray for Michael, Gary is a lousy role model for Jack, who’s straddling the fine line between boy and man, darkness and light. And much like Michael speeding along the road with his mother all those years ago, Jack is on the verge of a single, terrible action he can’t undo.
It might be this sense of mirroring that Michael responds to when he and Jack have their final reckoning, on a high craggy hill, which finds the two confronting one another not as angry men but as broken sons. Maybe they had to come up high, where the sheep roam, to break free of their terrible fathers, which isn’t exactly mercy but is as close as they’re going to get in this dark, dark story.