Film Review: "Bring Them Down"
The debut film from writer/director Christoper Andrews is a revenge tragedy that's as beautiful as it is bleak.
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Warning: Full spoilers for the films follow.
Damn, though, this is one of those films that sears itself into your mind. Once you’ve seen a film like Bring Them Down, you’re not likely to forge it. It’s a bloody Irish revenge tragedy that grabs hold of you from the beginning and doesn’t let go until the final wrenching moments. It is, as Matt Zoller Seitz puts it, brutally biblical in its tone, its subject, and its characters. It’s one of those films that makes you feel powerless as you watch the action unfold, its protagonists caught up in a terrible cycle of violence that they seem unable or unwilling to stop once it begins.
I loved every minute of it.
When the film begins, Michael O’Shea (who remains unseen, as the opening sequence is shot from his point of view), is driving his mother and girlfriend, the former of whom announces that she is leaving his father. Michael, seemingly enraged at this, speeds up, leading to an accident that kills his mother and leaves girlfriend Caroline (played as an older woman by Nora-Jane Noone) with a scar. Fast forward several years, and Michael is still living with his father, Ray (Colm Meaney), who has become nearly immobile thanks to bad knees, while Caroline has married another sheep farmer Gary (Paul Ready) and had a son, Jack (Barry Keoghan). When Jack steals a couple of rams from the O’Sheas, he sets in motion a series of increasingly violent interactions that leave no one unscathed. Sheep have their legs cut off, people are decapitated, and it all ends where it began: in violence and melancholy.
I’ve been a fan of Christopher Abbott’s since he appeared in Girls ages ago, and it’s been nice to see him get some nice, meaty roles to sink his teeth into (pun intended, given that he stars in Wolf Man). He brings a brooding intensity to Michael, a man who harbors conflicted feelings about his father, for while he’s obviously loyal–he does bring him a man’s head, after all, even if it’s not the one responsible for cutting the legs off their sheep and stabbing their dog–but he also seems to despise him, both for his immobility and for the fact that he keeps Michael himself trapped in a way of life that doesn’t seem to bring him any particular pleasure. There’s something almost Heathcliff-like about Michael, who is equal parts brooding and fierce, extremely hot and extremely dangerous.
Barry Keoghan is likewise perfectly cast (as he usually is) as a little chaos goblin, wreaking havoc, sometimes with more than a little malice and at others with the sort of flippancy that we almost associate with adolescent boys with more bravado than brains. As always with Keoghan’s performance, however, there’s far more to Jack than meets the eye. There’s a certain pain and vulnerability lurking beneath the strut that he so often adopts, one that grows more acute as his parents’ marriage continues to deteriorate, and his own actions lead to terrible consequences for both himself and everyone around him.
The narrative of Bring Them Down moves along with a heavy inevitability, with each escalation building on the last in a domino effect that is both thrilling and terrifying to watch. The theft of the rams leads to a confrontation at a sheep fair, leading to Gary trying to rear-end Michael, which leads to a nearly-fatal crash. The widening gulf between Caroline and Gary–brought about by some foolish investments on the latter’s part–and the existing tensions with the O’Sheas leads Jack to conspire with his cousin to cut the legs off of the O’Sheas’ entire flock of sheep (a truly horrifying sequence from both Michael’s point of view and Jack’s).
A shift of perspective and time halfway through allows us to see the events that lead up to the sheep-mutilating from Jack’s point of view, allowing us to see it as the result of goading from his cousin, from a desire to get his parents more money and, quite honestly, from just being young and dumb. The third act, meanwhile, brings the two together, as Michael–having already committed murder, thinking that he’d managed to kill the person responsible for mutilating his flock, killing his dog, and bringing his family to financial ruin–realizes that, as he bluntly puts it, he’s brought his father the wrong head. Jack, seeing the murder in Michael’s eyes and knowing that he’s next, flees up the mountain, Michael pursuing him with a dogged and unflappable dedication. With its pacing and the dread-inducing scoring from Hannah Peel, this final sequence plays out very much like a horror film, with Michael fitting neatly into the role of the vengeful monster determined to destroy his increasingly animal-like prey.
It all leads to a dreadful (and, as one critic puts it, bleakly humorous) confrontation on the mountain, one which ends with Jack begging for mercy–repeatedly crying out that he’s sorry and that he didn’t mean it–as he stabs Michael in a desperate attempt to escape, only to end up getting stabbed himself. The sight of a knife sticking out of him seems to bring Michael back to his senses, but it’s clear that nothing can ever be the same. Even though Caroline takes Jack to the hospital, the sheep are still dead, Michael is still a murderer, and it’s very unclear whether the younger man will survive. In a revenge tragedy, no one really emerges unmarked, and so it is here. Caroline isn’t the only one who’s been scarred by Michael’s deep-rooted rage, and Jack’s irresponsible decisions will mar both his life and that of his family.
It’s safe to say that Bring Them Down is not a film for the faint of heart. Both its sound design–the screaming of the sheep is surely something designed to lodge itself in the viewer’s spine–and the relentlessly cascading series of bad decisions by its two main characters give it the feeling of a thriller. There were many times in the film when I was literally on the edge of my seat, wondering what new horror was about to unfold. It’s also a breath-takingly beautiful film, with many awe-inducing shots of Irish mountains, whose imposing bulk remind us of the deep histories and deep enmities on this Emerald Isle.
Bring Them Down is also a film that denies us easy answers or cut-and-dry moralizing. One gets the sense that the feud between the two families is one that has deep roots in the mountain and its past–at one point the elder O’Shea tries to veto Michael’s desire to bring the sheep down from the peak, arguing that such a thing hasn’t been done in 500 years–and that there’s deep bad blood between the two feuding families whose flocks often exist in close proximity to one another. Given this, it’s not surprising that the foolhardy actions of a young man should lead to such heartbreaking tragedy for everyone concerned. There’s bad blood here, and it scalds everyone in touches, whether sheep, dog, or human. Violence erupts in this world with little warning, and the characters, and we in the audience, are left to try to figure out a way out of its aftermath as best we can.