Director – Chris Andrews – 2024 – Ireland – Cert. 15 – 105m
**
A feud between two neighbouring, Irish sheep farmers is made worse by toxic masculinity on both sides– out in UK and Ireland cinemas on Friday, February 7th
Two women in a car are being driven down an isolated country road. The older one, Peggy (Susan Lynch), is in the passenger seat talking to the unseen driver about why she’s finally leaving his father. The younger one Catherine (Nora-Jane Noone) sits horrified in the back seat as the driver reacts to the conversation by going faster and faster. The older one repeatedly and with increasing urgency shouts at the driver, “Mikey, slow down.” Eventually, there is a crash. Catherine’s face is disfigured. Peggy doesn’t survive.
The car crash opening is hardly new to the movies, gracing films as diverse as thrillers Dead Calm (Philip Noyce, 1989) and The Descent (Neil Marshall, 2005), and children’s drama Fly Away Home (Carroll Ballard, 1996). The scene is used differently here, with the crash caused by wilfully bad driving, in turn caused by the driver’s emotional immaturity, which signals the intention of the piece, most of the narrative of which takes place some years later.
The grown Michael (Christopher Abbot from Possessor, Brandon Cronenberg, 2000) is now running the sheep farm of his disabled, housebound dad Ray (Colm Meaney) although you sense that the older man, if physically helpless, is still very much in charge. Michael, who regularly makes trips across the hilly land of his farm, discovers first that some of his sheep are dead and later, at the local sheep market, that rival next door farmer’s son Jack (Barry Keoghan) is selling some of Michael’s sheep mixed in with his own.
All this ramps up pretty rapidly into feud territory, the ante upped somewhat by the fact that Michael’s former girlfriend Caroline is Jack’s mother, and she is the wife of the farmer next door, Gary (Paul Ready). Sheep have their legs cut off by Gary and Jack, as these can be sold for a swift profit, and Gary is in financial trouble partly because Ray refused to sell him a strip of land Gary had planned to turn into lucrative holiday homes. Caroline is outside of Gary and Jack’s loop business-wise, so is unaware of their misdemeanours regarding harming and stealing Ray and Jack’s sheep.
The male characters are relentlessly nasty, and it’s hard to feel any sympathy for them. This might be a searing portrait of toxic masculinity, but the subject has been handled far better elsewhere in recent Irish cinema (Lakelands, Robert Higgins, Patrick McGivney, 2022; Calm with Horses, Nick Rowland, 2019). The women come off rather better – or they would if one of the two female protagonists had survived the opening flashback, with Nora Jane Noone’s performance as Caroline a definite highlight and a nice turn in a bit-part from Gail Fitzpatrick as a callous, black market butcher.
Much is made of the locations: claustrophobic chunks of hill grazing fields, and a farm thoroughfare gate which has been (and is later seen in flashback being) crushed by a trespassing car. Many of the exteriors are shot in inhospitable weather, and there are some effective nighttime sequences, for instance of sheep rustling, to boot.
It’s pushing it, though, at 105 minutes: there’s maybe a solid 60 minutes here.
Where it really comes unstuck is in using multiple time frames to rerun events from a different character’s perspective. If you want to see how to do this, go and watch Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1954), in which Kurosawa retold and subtly changed scenes via a second or third character, suggesting that one of the two or three, or more, was lying, and leaving you to puzzle out the truth of what had occurred. All you get in Bring Them Down are reruns which offer little beyond pointlessly restaging an otherwise identical scene shown earlier from a different vantage point five or so feet away, which really isn’t good enough. The opening scene with the car accident, which is never restaged in this manner, remains impressive.
Bring Them Down is out in cinemas in the UK and Ireland on Friday, February 7th.
Trailer: