Bring Them Down, Mubi’s new revenge drama, begs the same question that was posed in 2021’s The Banshees of Inisherin: what the hell are they doing in rural Ireland that makes them hate each other so much! In this we have Michael (Christopher Abbott), a shepherd who also looks after his father (Colm Meaney) whilst also dealing with the guilt of his part in a road accident that killed his mother and injured his then girlfriend Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone) 20 years ago. Now Caroline is married to rival neighbour Gary (Paul Ready), with a son Jack (Barry Keoghan). When Michael hears that Gary and Jack have stolen two of his rams, its sets out a very dramatic chain of events resulting in guns, knives and the unfortunate death of many many sheep.

The first act of this film is phenomenal, there’s a momentum that flows through as you see Michael having to do all the farm work whilst also caring for his father who cannot walk and only sits in his chair and shouts at him. The work often looks back breaking but the actual Irish environment is just breathtaking, the gorgeous environment looks cold and isolating, obviously mirroring the inner turmoil this character feels. When the plot gets going you can’t help but feel so intensely sorry for Michael, despite the things he’s done in the past you never feel like he deserves the treatment he gets. Never has a tortured bleat of a dying sheep ever sounded as heartbreaking as it does in this film. The plot does something interesting in that at the halfway point it switches from Michael to Jack instead, recounting all of the plot so far from Jack’s point of view, giving you the reason as to why all of these horrible things have happened. I do think this takes away that fantastic momentum from the film, making you rehash things all over again. I’m not sure if it might have been better to show this film in a more linear way instead. 

Christopher Abbott, an American actor, does a fantastic job of playing an Irishman. All the dialogue between him and his father is in the Irish language which is really great to see. It’s bold for a film to be around 25% in the Irish language when it doesn’t need to be. I do think that 32 year old Barry Keoghan is too damn old to be playing a late teenager, there is just an 8 year difference between him and Noone who plays his mother…that’s absolutely insane. All the other cast members are solid in their roles, perhaps the father is a little one dimensional and is an aspect of the film it doesn’t quite explore well enough. I do think that in the last act Abbott’s acting is also just a tad too internal, obviously the things he’s done are going to affect him but he’s so stone faced that it just comes across as a little wooden for me. I am a big Abbott fan though, and feel like he should be a lot more successful than he currently is right now.

Visually a stunning film, the Irish countryside just looks fantastic in this cold time of year they’re shooting. The score by Hannah Peel is absolutely outstanding, it’s haunting and layered, probably one of the best scores I’ve heard in an indie film in a long time. Writer/director Chris Andrews shows some serious potential in this debut feature, to make what feels like a gangland war in rural Ireland is no mean feat and there were parts of this film that were incredibly thrilling! I look forward to whatever he does next, and I do think with a better release this could’ve made a lot more of a splash in the British award circuit.