Barry Keoghan spirals into catastrophe in the stark, haunted Bring Them Down
Bring Them Down’s spiral into catastrophic violence begins with a broken bridge – two broken bridges, in fact. One is made of wood or stone and damaged to such a degree that sheep farmer Gary (Paul Ready) can’t afford to repair it. Now that he’s unable to move his livestock down from the hill into safer pastures, his entire livelihood has come under threat. The second bridge is of the emotional sort, a bond between neighbours in the rural west of Ireland, a place where community ties are so vital that a single fissure risks total collapse.
Michael (Christopher Abbott) carries a secret on his back, as heavy as the rams he throws over his shoulders and ferries between fields. It’s about the car crash that killed his mother. We see it, but don’t fully understand its context. He cares for his paraplegic father Ray (Colm Meaney), though the man’s largely left at home to marinate in his own resentment. They speak to each other in Irish. You get the sense the language will die with Ray. Down the road lives Gary and his wife, Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone), who bears a scar on her cheek. She was in the crash, too. Her teenage son, Jack (Barry Keoghan), is directionless and desperate for opportunity – even if it means violating the unspoken moral codes shared between sheep farmers.
Violence, under these circumstances, isn’t a foregone conclusion. Yet in Christopher Andrews’s stark, haunted debut – anchored by two soulfully frayed performances by Abbott and Keoghan – violence becomes the only language left to speak when shame, resentment, and desperation have stripped the words right out of these people’s mouths.
Andrews’s film, which he both wrote and directed, operates with a kind of ruthless empathy. Bring Them Down is shaped like a crime thriller, yet has the sharp ache of tragedy. It unfurls across a landscape beautifully lensed by cinematographer Nick Cooke, yet feels claustrophobic, as if that landscape might suddenly snap its jaws shut and swallow everyone whole. We start with Michael’s perspective before the story starts once again from Jack’s viewpoint – it creates less of a Rashomon-style revelation, since the viewpoints aren’t subjective or particularly in competition with each other, more a panicky sense of imminent collision.
A couple of rams have disappeared. Then come the smashed headlights, dead and mutilated animals, discharged guns, and on and on and on. Very few words are spoken. The Connecticut-born Abbott not only masters the Irish accent but its language, and lets the rest of his performance lie in the strange intensity he can muster in those big, brown eyes of his (wasted recently in Hollywood fare such as Kraven the Hunter and Wolf Man). He doesn’t look at people so much as through and past them, right at the history they’ve left trailing behind their backs.
Keoghan convincingly plays a decade or so younger with a handful of well-placed tics – in the uncertain way he clenches his reddened knuckles and mumbles his lines into the collar of his jacket. He plays Jack as a kid who’s doing a very bad job of convincing everyone he’s an adult, and who withers into dust the second real consequences come careening around the corner. “Where there’s livestock, there’s deadstock,” he says with a shrug, once the topic of slain rams crops up. There’s a faux wisdom to how he delivers it. By the end of Bring Them Down, the child’s terror in his voice rings with painful clarity. Here’s a film where regret is stepped into every crevice.
Dir: Christopher Andrews. Starring: Barry Keoghan, Christopher Abbott, Nora-Jane Noone, Paul Ready, Aaron Heffernan, Conor MacNeill, Susan Lynch, Colm Meaney. Cert 15, 105 mins.
‘Bring Them Down’ is in cinemas from 7 February
