Bring Them Down – A Family Feud Turns Ugly (Early Review)

Between closing out 2024 with Kraven the Hunter and ringing in 2025 with Wolf Man, it might be safe to say that Christopher Abbott isn’t quite experiencing the boost in profile befitting an indie-favourite actor of such raw intensity. It’s clear that, as of right now at least, the compelling American performer is far more comfortable on the set of an intimate drama than a rubbery blockbuster or a flailing horror flick, so perhaps some fresh air from the wide-open Irish countryside may be just what the doctor ordered. If Abbott wants to stake his claim in this new milieu, however, he has to contend with one of the nation’s native sons for that attention.

The Motherland golden boy in question is, naturally, Barry Keoghan, who competes with Abbott in Bring Them Down not just in a metaphorical sense; Christopher Andrews’s directorial debut quite literally pits these young stars-to-be against one another for a time-honored tradition of family feuding. It’s a decent enough framework for a successful small-scale feature—in that Andrews is mostly reliant on the ambiance of his setting and the vigour of his performers to carry a sparse plot—but sometimes, there simply isn’t enough depth between the solemn glares to be fleshed out to feature length.

Like most features cataloguing the infighting between two petty clans, Bring Them Down opens in the midst of its chosen row, as Michael (Abbott) and Jack (Keoghan) play the sons of two sheep farmers who share a hillside. From the opening shot, there’s already a history between Michael and Jack’s mother Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone) when the former causes a car crash that permanently scars the latter and kills his own mother in the process. Michael is only left with his crotchety, chair-bound father (Meaney) as he tends to their flock against the territorial advances of Caroline’s husband Gary (Paul Ready) and their son.

Tensions between the two factions reach a boiling-point when Jack claims that two of Michael’s rams were found dead and subsequently disposed of, only to catch the boy and his father attempting to sell them on the market the next day. From there, a series of retaliatory measures escalate from angered shoves to some pretty gruesome crimes against unsuspecting livestock, as Andrews attempts to put us in the heads of these younger men who’ve taken things too far with little more than the lack of words shared between them.

Already prepped as something of a commentary on how men refuse to engage with their emotions, Bring Them Down surely takes this premise to its extremes, but it’s difficult to assess whether or not its chosen tone benefits that sort of exploration given the lengths to which these retaliations wind up going. This is especially noticeable in Andrews’s mid-film decision to suddenly shift from Michael’s perspective on the whole ordeal to Jack’s, an ostensibly enriching choice that doesn’t prove to add anything to the picture from that shift; seeing these events through Jack’s eyes doesn’t really paint them in a new light beyond mildly softening his sense of complicity, but at the end of the day, the extent of the blame for this conflict (to a point, at least) appears largely one-sided.

Naturally, one can argue that it’s not the extent of guilt that drives Bring Them Down, but rather the overplayed reactions from the respective parties to their mounting obstructions, feeding into its minor commentary on fragile masculinity. This would be easier to accept were Andrews approaching the film from less of a dramatic thriller perspective and more of one that plays these reactions for dark comedy, but the permeating self-seriousness of it all makes the intent, whatever it is, difficult to swallow.

In that sense, Bring Them Down also suffers from comparisons to Grímur Hákonarson’s Icelandic film Rams, another (this time comedic) drama which not only tackles similar thematics, but does so with exactly the same driving force of livestock; that film owns up to the ridiculousness of the theatrics without sacrificing the genuine venom that lies between its own protagonists, but Andrews struggles to do the same given his own attempts to bathe his film in a veneer of suffocating solemnity.

At the very least, Abbott takes this opportunity of a new setting to let his quiet potency luxuriate in this crisp new setting, even gaining the opportunity to bust out some Irish-language dialogue delivered with surprising frequency and fluency (as can be ascertained from a non-speaker, anyhow) throughout the film. Andrews certainly knows how much value he can get out of Abbott’s intense stare—less so than he understands the value of Keoghan’s own often-fidgety disposition—but Bring Them Down rarely matches that stare with a sight worthy of its emphasis.

still courtesy of MUBI

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Julian Malandruccolo

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