Movie Review: Bring Them Down

There’s something impressive about a movie that can make the audience feel visceral hatred towards a character. In his feature writing and directing debut, Christopher Andrews will have you absolutely seething with rage at nearly all of them for at least some of its runtime. Even after their motivations get fleshed out it remains difficult to muster much sympathy for the worst of them, with only the impressive cast getting us to care even the tiniest bit.

Michael (Christopher Abbott) killed his mother in a reckless driving accident as a young man, seriously injuring his neighbor / girlfriend Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone) in the process. Years later he still lives with his rage-prone father Ray (Colm Meaney) and tends to the family’s flock of sheep. Caroline still lives on the neighboring sheep farm, but it is now tended to by her husband Gary (Paul Ready) and naïve adult son Jack (Barry Keoghan).

When Ray receives a call that two of their rams were found dead on the neighbors’ property, he dispatches Michael to deal with it, but he returns without any concrete information. The next day at the regional livestock market, Michael recognizes his supposedly “dead” sheep among Gary’s flock and nearly comes to blows with the man over it before both are removed for the day. Despite being very clearly in the wrong, Gary is livid about the public humiliation and he and his son begin a campaign of harassment against Michael, culminating in a shocking act that pushes him over the edge.

This is a dark movie, figuratively and sometimes literally (a few scenes are quite difficult to see). At no point do any of the human characters seem to be happy about anything, leaving the striking vistas of the Irish countryside to serve as the sole source of beauty to be found. Caroline is the only genuinely kind person in the story and clearly does love her child, qualities ably portrayed by the charming Ms. Noone, but she is surrounded by people that are cruel, selfish, angry, damaged, or some combination thereof.

Abbott is superb as a man beaten down by his circumstances, some of his own making, who is trying (and failing) to retain some shred of humanity and Keoghan is excellent as always, but Paul Ready’s Gary gets to serve as the real nexus of the viewer’s ire and it’s a role he inhabits perfectly. I honestly can’t say when the last time was that I felt such utter contempt towards a fictional character as I did here. When the film doubles back to show us Jack’s side of the story and fills in some of why Gary acts the way he does I felt like I understood him a little better, but I didn’t loathe him any less.

As the characters take increasingly unhinged actions against each other and they piece together who did what to who, the situation grows more and more volatile leading to a tense, bleak finale. Angry at each other rather than the outside forces that keep them down, and unwilling to seek the mental help they clearly need, the men in this movie represent the most toxic traits of our traditional ideas of masculinity personified and Bring Them Down is their effect on our society in microcosm. ★★★★