Director: Christopher Andrews Starring: Christopher Abbott, Barry Keoghan, Nora-Jane Noone, Paul Ready, Aaron Heffernan, Colm Meaney Running Time: 106 minutes
Watching the exports of the European arthouse over the last few years, one of the big strains of film I’ve seen pop up has been the rural paranoid thriller. These are dour films shot in bleak, open country, with tremendous simmering conflicts existing in the vacuum of some supposedly bygone togetherness and community. Films like Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s The Beasts in Galicia or Cristian Mungiu’s R.M.N in Transylvania have painted stark pictures of these isolated communities that feel left in the dust by the march of progress, while their opportunities dwindle by the day. It’s really a wonder it’s taken so long for us to have our own native take on such a film, but here it is in Christopher Andrews’ debut Bring Them Down, a propulsive, Connemara-set two-hander starring Christopher Abbott and Barry Keoghan as Michael and Jack, two farmer’s sons of different generations. The men are spurred to a rapidly escalating series of vengeful misunderstandings after Jack steals two of Michael’s rams in a naive attempt to impress his father.
The film was conceived by Andrews after working in farms in the north of England where the film was originally to be set, starring Tom Burke and Paul Mescal (somewhat unthinkable picks having seen the film), before shooting moved to Wicklow for the sake of our lovely tax credits. You’d think this would lead to some inauthenticity to the film’s depiction of Irishness, but in watching I never doubted it for a second. Abbott delivers a sizeable portion of his performance as Gaeilge without missing too much of a beat (at least to my admittedly rusty Ordinary Level Leaving Cert ears), and Colm Meaney brings an effortless realism to Michael’s cantankerous and contrary aul’ father Ray as he spurs Michael on to act more and more rashly in revenge. If anything the weak link in the film’s authenticity is Barry Keoghan, whose preposterous (and, I suppose, previously Academy Award nominated) western accent previously heard in Banshees of Inisherin rears its head again here. Fortunately the film is driven more by action than word, so it never becomes too much to bear. Also doing notable work here, returning from her acclaimed turn in Cathy Brady’s 2021 release Wildfire, Nora-Jane Noone does well with a heavy hand as Caroline, it’s the sole real role for a woman in the film and she does regrettably end up largely defined by her relationships to the film’s men, as Jack’s mother and Michael’s ex-girlfriend. She’s even mistaken by Ray for his dead wife at a crucial part in the film, but that’s often par of the course for these small-scope explorations of violent masculinity. Maybe I’m desensitised to it all but I wasn’t too bothered by it.
I spent much of the start of the film wondering why they’d gotten Barry Keoghan for such a small part, questioning if maybe this was shot 3 or 4 years ago when he could still be a supporting player in a film like this, but then the film revealed its structural gambit and completely won me over. First we spend a bit under an hour with the camera resting squarely on the side of Abbott’s Michael as he escalates the conflict, comings to fisticuffs with Jack and his father at a local sheep mart, running around with his rifle as he chases the mysterious rustlers cutting his sheeps’ legs off to sell for €100 a pop on the black market and so on and so on. Then, when tensions hit their fever pitch, the film pulls it back to before we met him, and we follow Keoghan’s Jack through the other side of the same series of events. This is, frankly, a genius use of these two actors, who both have the movie star command to generate some small level of sympathy through all the horrid things they’re doing to each other as long as you’re following their side, but as soon as you flip that camera around and they become object instead of subject, they’re terrifying. Keoghan has of course built his whole career playing little demons, but it’s Abbott that really impresses on this level, skulking around with a grim look on his face at the edge of frames, he carries all the foreboding dread of the great movie monsters without any need for makeup or prosthetics (sorry, Wolf Man).
Bring Them Down offers a compelling take on the revenge thriller, planting it in a setting that’s a fertile new ground for the genre, letting its core conflict and its fantastic central performers act as a compelling stand-in for the war between two generations of Irish men and their ideas of masculinity, as they wile their time away in the midst of the valleys looking for their dear old Daddys’ approval.
(4 / 5)
Bring Them Down is in cinemas from 7th February