After some of his rams wander off, Michael (Christopher Abbott) brings the flock down from the mountain to graze in the pastures closer to home.  After noticing the rams that wandered off were for sale at a farm show by Gary (Paul Ready) and his son, Jack (Barry Keoghan), Michael confronts the pair, his neighbors, and reignites a decades-long feud between the two farmers.  With both young men caught in the crossfire of their fathers’ fury, Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone), Michael’s ex-girlfriend and Gary’s current wife, is forced into the position of mediating between two parties who vehemently refuse to let go of this grudge. 

Christopher Andrews writes and directs Bring Them Down, an Irish farm drama which he broke with Jonathan Hourigan.  Mubi helped to fund the 105-minute film, premiering it at the 2024 running of the Toronto International Film Festival ahead of a limited theatrical rollout in February and finally reaching the eponymous streaming service in late March. 

Andrews opens his film with a very unhappy scene, setting the tone for the rest of the narrative to come.  A younger Michael (Youssef Quinn) is driving with Peggy (Susan Lynch), his mother, and Caroline (Grace Daly).  Peggy tells her son that she is going to be leaving his father, and in a rage, Michael speeds down the winding, rural roads, eventually crashing the truck, killing his mother and severely injuring Caroline and himself in the process. 

The film jumps forward in time to where Abbot and Noone take over their roles in a rather abrasive first act.  Andrews’ script is almost actively avoiding giving shape to the narrative, instead placing the audience in the center of a rapidly unfolding situation with only vague hints at the wider context.  It is a bold way to deliver a story, and one that ultimately works out in the end, but it makes for a rather punishing experience while watching the film tell an already punishing story and simultaneously avoiding some of the common practices in setting the stage for the drama to come. In this way, Andrews treats us like any of the bystanders in this feud, not bothering to go back and relitigate the fight but forced to contend with the gruff animosity that hangs over the village like a dark cloud.  Anchored by Abbott’s gruff performance, we stay invested into this tale of woe, trustful that Andrews knows where he is leading this drama. 

Abbott’s Michael is another barrier to entry for the audiences into Bring Them Down, but again, it is more a barrier to our understanding of the narrative than an unscalable obstacle.  He plays Micheal as a man stuck in a rut, always moving forward but looking down, not towards any real discernible goal.  Feelings of guilt certainly color the performance, and there is a noticeable sting when he must interact with Caroline and see the way that Gary treats her.  Bring Them Down is not shy about its contempt towards the stubbornness that often accompanies these more machismo worlds; in this case, rural livestock farming.  We know Michael sees Caroline – a second symbol to what he lost the day of the car crash – and in his mind at least he tells himself he would be better than Gary for her, but from our outside perspective seeing how life is like on the other side of the property line, we seriously question Michael’s reasoning.  Alas, most dramatic protagonists share this flaw, which is so often the ingredient that turns a drama into a tragedy. 

Opposite Abbott for much of the film is Keoghan, giving a performance pulled straight out of his wheelhouse as an affable and awkward, misguided soul.  It is fine, but at this point in his busy career, it feels very rote.  Some of this is the fault of the script which tries to show that same stuck-in-a-rut experience through Jack’s very different lens from Michael’s.  The groundwork is there, but for much of the front half of the film, Jack seems like an almost oafish presence, living in a world that unfortunately reacts to his stumbling with crude words and a smack to the head, helping nobody.  Andrews gives himself an opening to correct this and add some depth to Keoghan’s role right around the halfway point of the film when he jumps back to the missing sheep and plays out the drama now from Jack’s point of view.  Admittedly, it is a frustrating jump to take as at this point we still have very little idea what this story is even building towards and without a real idea of a conclusion, it is hard to embark on a Rashoman (1950) like journey as we do not yet understand what is left to solve having already established that Micheal crashed the car, Jack stole the sheep, and Gary’s builders slaughtered the rest of the flock in a very disturbing scene that ends the first half of the film. 

Andrews, however, still has a few tricks left on the page in the final act that plays out after Jack’s story catches up to the bloody night in the field where we left Michael.  Bring Them Down takes an incredibly dark turn for its “third act” when Jack and Michael’s stories begin to intertwine.  Charged by his father, Ray (Colm Meaney), Michael is to bring him the head of the builders that cut off the legs of his sheep, leaving them to bleed out in the fields.  Setting out on his path of vengeance, the final twenty or so minutes of this film play out akin to a Greek tragedy where chaos erupts like a volcano, all stemming from a series of rash decisions made by characters blinded by their own sense of rage and filtered knowledge of their personal experience.  Nick Cooke’s cinematography is unafraid to enter the fray, a stark difference from the first two acts where it tried to keep its distance, and George Cragg’s patient until this point editing becomes frantic as rage boils over in Michael and fear ovewhelms Jack. 

Bring Them Down chronicles a simmering feud and how it pulls down the community in which it is playing out; Grímur Hákonarson’s Rams (2015) and Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) come quickly to mind, as well as Joshua Marston’s The Forgiveness of Blood (2012).  With a sharp title that has a bit of a double meaning beyond just bringing the sheep down from the mountain, Andrews’ script is layered and delivered in a way that would make for an enthralling short story, but struggles to have that same impact when told on screen simply in the way that it has to be distilled to its audience.  Far from being avant-garde as there are still enough formal structures in place, it is still well worth one’s time in the end, but between the doubling back narrative and an almost infuriating pacing in the first half as Andrews holds all the revelations until late in the film, it nevertheless becomes a difficult film to experience, even beyond its incredibly upsetting plot.  For a feature debut, however, Bring Them Down is an exceptional entry.  Andrews has proven as a screenwriter that he does not get bogged down in sentimentality with his characters, and as a director, he is able to foster a relentless dedication to tone across cast and crafts, creating a searing depth to a story as old as time.