Those who break down at the sight of animal cruelty will want to avoid Bring Them Down. The savage butchery inflicted on sheep and rams by rival farming families in rural west Ireland matches the darkness in the souls of men and women hardened by the land, by economic hardship, by a legacy of violence. If The Banshees of Inisherin was just too cheery for you, this painfully grim fable will also bring you down into the dumps. This isn’t the kind of film you go in expecting to enjoy, but to endure.
While originally planned as a starring vehicle for Paul Mescal and Tom Burke, Bring Them Down eventually went to Barry Keoghan and Christopher Abbott. No loss there. Both men bring a grit, a hard-scrabble earthiness that is right for these people who are surrounded by grass and stone. Abbott plays Michael, a hot-tempered farmer and sheepherder living along with his ornery old man Ray (played by the great Irish actor Colm Meaney), who may have passed that volatility to his son. Meaney, who I believe is in every Irish movie ever made, speaks nearly the entire film in Gaelic, with Abbott joining him through most of their interactions. It’s probably a good idea to turn on subtitles, even when the two aren’t on screen as the accents are thicker than a sheep’s wool.
Michael can’t do anything right in Ray’s eyes, despite working from morning to night trying to put food on the table. His ex-girlfriend Caroline (The Magdalene Sisters‘ Nora-Jane Noone, always a treat), who remains connected to Michael through a past tragedy neither has overcome, is married to rival farmer Gary (Paul Ready), an abusive alcoholic but a fundamentally weak man in need of money and a piece of land Ray won’t sell. Barry Keoghan plays their adult son, Jack, who carries some of the same awkward naivete as Keoghan’s character in Banshees of Inisherin.
Like a lit stick of dynamite, the tension runs quick and explodes when some of Michael’s prized rams are found dead on Gary’s property. From there, it’s a blood feud with the cold cruelty of a mob war. People are killed, an entire flock of sheep is mutilated, ears get shot off, and murder isn’t too far behind. There’s desperation in the eyes of every person in this conflict, but the screenplay doesn’t offer us enough to sympathize with them or to explain their actions. Writer/director Christopher Andrews pushes the brutality too far at times, such as in an over-the-top final encounter, that it undercuts the real human stakes for these characters.
The passionate lead performances do a better job in conveying the tragedies that have forged these people into who they are. There can be no hope for them having grown up in a place where there is so little joy. Andrews employs a Rashomon-style narrative to offer both sides of every deed, but in every version the inhumanity remains the same. Bring Them Down isn’t perfect, but it’s one of those easy-to-miss thrillers packed with powerful performances and haunting visuals that make it one to seek out, even if you can only bear to watch it only once.
MUBI opens Bring Them Down in theaters on February 7th.
