Right from its opening moments, sheep herding drama Bring Them Down hurls its audience into a waking nightmare.
A car careens down a winding road in western Ireland. Inside, a woman in the passenger seat (Susan Lynch) tells her driving son Michael (Christopher Abbott, Wolf Man, Sanctuary) that she is leaving his father. His reaction? To speed up to a dangerous degree. Writer-director Christopher Andrews never shows us Michael in this opening, only his mother and his girlfriend Caroline's (Nora-Jane Noone) increasing panic at his recklessness. We're locked in with them, hurtling through a frightening situation beyond our control. Andrews escalates that terror to a fever pitch before the inevitable happens: Michael crashes the car, killing his mother and permanently scarring Caroline's face.
The crash is just the beginning of Bring Them Down's violent tragedy, an explosive start to a directorial debut that simmers with panic and dread. As Andrews brings that tension to a boil, he crafts a vicious saga of feuding families, toxic masculinity, and the poor, innocent sheep caught in the middle of it all.
What is Bring Them Down about?
Bring Them Down picks up several years after the opening car crash. Michael is now the sole caretaker for his ailing, belligerent father Ray (Colm Meaney), and he's also taken over the family's centuries-old sheep herding business. He and Ray share their mountain with another sheep herding family, made up of patriarch Gary (Paul Ready), Caroline, and their son Jack (Barry Keoghan, Saltburn, The Banshees of Inisherin). Slight animosity already bubbles between Gary and Ray, but when Jack steals two of Michael's rams and claims they've died, he blows the families' dispute wide open. Taunts give way to violence, which gives way to a brutal quest for vengeance on Michael's end.
With Michael's goal in mind, Bring Them Down could just be a straightforward vengeance story. But Andrews opts for a Rashomon-style perspective switch that offers up both Michael and Jack's points of view on the transpiring events. That tactic, complete with Abbott and Keoghan's performances, makes Bring Them Down a tense two-header.
Christopher Abbott and Barry Keoghan go head-to-head in Bring Them Down.
Abbott and Keoghan have both carved out space for themselves as daring actors unafraid of stranger roles, so it's a pleasure to watch them square off in the intense pressure cooker of Bring Them Down.
Abbott's Michael is a quiet loner, but the opening car crash sequence proves that his quietude hides a seething, reckless rage. Caroline's scar remains physical proof of this, an omnipresent reminder that, while we might feel sympathy for Michael for his sheep troubles, he still has much to atone for. There's the sense that him caring for his father — the very man his mother was trying to escape — is part of that, especially since Ray berates Michael at every turn.
As Jack, Keoghan's role is twofold. From Michael's perspective, Jack is a slippery antagonist hellbent on wrecking his life. Once we see Jack's point of view, we realize he's a desperate screw-up working at the whims of others, like his father Gary or his cousin Lee (Aaron Heffernan, Brassic). Jack doesn't understand the consequences of what he's done until it's too late. Through his eyes, Michael becomes a quietly menacing force, recalibrating our perception of the man we spent the first half of the film with. Both Abbott and Keoghan work wonders with the perspective switches, finding new facets of two very complicated men who may be more alike than they'd know.
After all, Jack's desire to please and help Gary calls to mind Michael's reaction to his mother wanting to leave Ray: He would do anything, no matter how awful, to appease his father. That cycle of sons doing the unthinkable for their fathers is the heart of Bring Them Down's examination of toxic masculinity. Michael has already been warped by his relationship with Ray, whose horrible treatment of his son likely stems from his own father, and his father before him. Jack, several years younger than Michael, may not be too far behind.
History continues to repeat itself elsewhere with Caroline. Like Michael's mother, Caroline is planning on leaving her husband, but she keeps getting drawn into Gary and Jack's rivalry with Ray and Michael. She's an innocent caught up in this storm, and she's not the only one.
The sheep scenes in Bring Them Down are not for the faint of heart.
Michael's mother and Caroline aren't the only casualties of Bring Them Down's men. Michael's sheep herd suffers greatly, in a grotesque animal mutilation scene that may already be one of the year's most upsetting sequences. Remember when Jenny the donkey died as a result of a bitter feud in The Banshees of Inisherin? The fate of Bring Them Down's sheep makes that look like a fairy tale.
Aside from the occasional shot of bloody flesh and wool, Andrews lets much of the sheep mutilation play out through sound. Hannah Peel's thumping, percussion-heavy score is pure sonic dread, while Gert Janssen's sound design is a stomach-churning combination of squelching and sheep bleating. (Don't worry: According to Bring Them Down's press notes, Andrews made the distressed sheep noises himself, which were then edited.)
The entire sequence, like the opening car crash, feels like a grounded nightmare from which there is no escape. Neither Michael nor Jack can outrun the sheep's pain either, culminating in a darkly funny climax that blurs the lines between human and animal. There's no forgetting the horrors they've wrought or their near-pitiable final confrontation, just as there's no forgetting Bring Them Down.
