Fences make good neighbors, as the saying goes. But farming doesn’t always allow for such barriers, 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 pits two families that share one hillside against each other. Michael (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 (Ready, The Terror), who seemingly has everything Michael lacks or lost: a successful farm, a happy marriage to Caroline (Noone, The Magdalene Sisters, The Descent), and even help around the farm from his son, Jack (Keoghan, Saltburn, The Killing of a Sacred Deer). That Gary seems to want everything left of Michael’s life sets the two men 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 by way of Keoghan, who does his best in a part for which he is clearly too old by a decade. The problem might have been worse if Andrews had got his original casting choice of Paul Mescal for Jack, as Keoghan is at least marginally more convincing as a 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 fit better into the physically demanding task of sheep rearing than Abbott’s gym-body leanness.
Andrews does at least 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 still happens, and profit margins are so low that losing a couple of sheep can break a small farm and the farmer. Andrews and cowriter Jonathan Hourigan even use a long-established 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. But grit and honest muck are two different things, and Bring Them Down needs more of the latter.
A version of this review previously ran during Fantastic Fest 2024.
This article appears in February 7 • 2025.
