‘Bring Them Down’: Toronto Review

Dir: Christopher Andrews. Ireland/UK/Belgium. 2024. 106mins 

Writer-director Christopher Andrews’ feature debut exists in a world beset by tragedy and old wounds that have never healed. Starring Christopher Abbott as a sheep farmer haunted by a past mistake, Bring Them Down follows the man’s growing war with a younger rival, played with ragged edge by Barry Keoghan, that has been building up over years. Although hardly the first film to address toxic masculinity and the scourge of violence in small-town communities, this grimly compelling drama possesses a scruffy integrity.

In Andrews’ vision, rural Ireland is as harsh as the Old West

Bring Them Down premieres as a Toronto Special Presentation before travelling to Fantastic Fest and the London Film Festival. Mubi will be handling for several territories, including the UK and US, and Keoghan’s star power will likely help at the arthouse. 

Set in remote, rural west Ireland, the picture stars Abbott as Michael, who raises sheep on the family farm where he lives with his raging, ailing father Ray (Colm Meany). Years ago, Michael was behind the wheel when his mother told him she was leaving his father. The resulting accident killed her and left Michael’s girlfriend Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone), who was in the back seat, with permanent facial scars. Caroline has since moved on and married fellow farmer Gary (Paul Ready), and the couple’s son Jack (Keoghan) is competitive with Michael. 

With his debut, Andrews, a 2019 Screen Star Of Tomorrow, has little room for compassion or romanticising his characters’ increasingly violent tendencies. Once Jack steals two of Michael’s prized sheep, trying to pass them off as his own, hostilities between the families quickly escalate. In Andrews’ vision, rural Ireland is as harsh as the Old West.

One of the film’s supporting characters notes that Ray is content to sit in his misery, a description that applies to just about everyone we meet in Bring Them Down. There is little in the way of humour or lightness as Michael and Jack ratchet up their war, with Andrews eventually pausing the narrative in order to replay certain key sequences from another character’s perspective. An inevitable fatalism hovers over the proceedings. Frequently, Bring Them Down makes this feud feel nearly biblical, the bloodshed shocking and wholly lacking in catharsis. Andrews does not choose sides in a conflict filled with angry, stubborn men.

As might be expected, though, that narrowly focused tonal scope gives the film little room to breathe. At one point, the exasperated Caroline, who still harbours feelings for Michael and has grown dissatisfied with her marriage, confesses that she’s suffocating in this small town, and viewers may feel similarly. Andrews paints this community as one of endless suffering – even the sheep are not immune from the cruelty — and the writer-director’s relentless pursuit of his thematic points can easily succumb to overkill. 

What saves this uneven material is the actors’ committed, anguished turns. Keoghan may be doing a variation on his performance in the more nuanced The Banshees Of Inisherin, but his portrayal of a budding brute is suitably sobering. In such films as this, it is often up to the ensemble’s principal female performer to inject a little humanity – as reductive as the trope might be, Noone is nonetheless moving as the physically and emotionally scarred Caroline. Noone and Abbott convey a tender rapport, hinting at a love that was destroyed during a moment of senseless rage. The brooding Abbott ensures that his character’s every ugly, violent act afterward is a reflection of his grief over that past sin. Michael knows he cannot be forgiven, and is doomed to take out his pain on anyone unlucky enough to cross his path.