Fantastic Fest Review: Bring Them Down

Barry Keoghan and Christopher Abbott in Bring Them Down (Image Courtesy of Mubi)

Fences make good neighbors, as the saying goes. But farming doesn’t always allow for fences, especially sheep farming in places like Ireland, where shared or common land is an essential asset.

Such contested property is the battleground of Bring Them Down, the violent rural tragedy from first-time writer/director Chris Andrews. The emotionally grueling and mud-flecked drama, which took the jury award for Best Feature at last week’s Fantastic Fest, pits two families that share one hillside against each other. Michael (Christopher Abbott, Possessor Uncut, Sanctuary) made a terrible mistake when he was younger, destroying his life and giving him little else to do than guard his small flock. Across the way is Gary (Paul Ready, The Terror), who seemingly has everything Michael lacks or lost: a successful farm, a happy marriage to Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone, The Magdalene Sisters, The Descent), and even help around the farm from his son, Jack (Barry Keoghan, Saltburn, The Killing of a Sacred Deer). That Gary seems to want even more sets them on an inevitable course to violence, animal mutilation, and irredeemable sin intended to break the audience's allegiances.

The intention seems to be to meld social realism with Gothic excess, and Andrews undoubtedly helps keep his character study firmly grounded in the muck of Irish subsistence farming, the kind that has barely changed in a thousand years. Yet for anyone that knows sheep farming, there are a few pivotal moments that feel inauthentic. Those feel like lost opportunities, especially when compared to Francis Lee’s exceptional take of shepherding in Yorkshire, 2017’s God's Own Country: Lee found drama in veracity, whereas there feel like shortcuts at play here.

There’s the bigger, related issue that Michael just looks too clean to have spent a day tromping across the moors and wrangling sheep (let’s just say there’s a reason farmers don’t wear white woolen jumpers). That cleanliness isn’t a minor aesthetic issue. Abbott does sterling work in the part, giving Mikey a haunted quality and holding his own against the great Colm Meaney as his father, Ray, an embittered old husk of a man. Meaney feels far more like someone who has spent his entire life on the moors and has been broken down physically in the right ways. The same goes for Ready as Gary, who has that taciturn griminess that feels authentic. However, the biggest casting problem comes from Keoghan who does his best in a part for which he is clearly too old by a decade. Much of the Fantastic Fest audience was genuinely surprised when it’s explained that he’s supposed to be Gary and Caroline’s son, not Gary’s grown-up little brother. The problem might have been worse if Andrews had got his original casting choice of Paul Mescal for Jack, as Keoghan at least makes a more convincing callow youth. But then we also miss out on the original choice of Tom Burke for Michael, and it’s hard not to see that his weathered bulk would have fitted better into the physically demanding task of sheep rearing than Andrews leanness.

Yet Andrews does get the broad strokes and details of this kind of rural life right enough to still remain engaging. Sheep farming is a solitary lifestyle that creates inward-looking communities. Grievances fester in the mud and moss, and it’s not unknown for people to disappear. Rustling is a major issue in the UK and Ireland, and margins are so low that losing a couple of sheep can break a small farm and the farmer. Andrews and cowriter Jonathan Hourigan even uses an industry-standard trick for telling whose sheep is whose to help drive the story at a key moment. Those insights, and the strengths of the performances, give Bring Them Down a fair measure of the grit to which they aspire.

Bring Them Down

Ireland, UK, Belgium, 2024, 105 min.
US premiere

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