The cold open of Bring Them Down is a bold strike. A mother in the passenger seat tells a driving Michael (who remains off-screen for the entire scene) that she plans on leaving his father, expressing that she is terrified of him. Without a word, Michael accelerates the car down a winding road in a wooded area despite the pleas from his mother and his girlfriend Caroline to slow. The panic is then silenced by the flash of the next scene, in which actor Christopher Abbott is sitting in the driver’s seat, looking at a marked grave of his mother.
Abbott is an older Michael now, who still lives with his ailing father Ray (Colm Meaney) in a lonely farm. I couldn’t emphasize lonely enough, as shots of Michael walking alongside his dog Mac against the stormy-gray Irish skies impress upon the thought that he does not have anyone to socialize with. The Michael that we see today moves with heaviness, permanently marked by the consequences of his anger.
When he discovers that his neighbor Gary (Paul Ready) has stolen his rams and tries to sell them off as his own, it takes a lot for Michael to not cause a scene at the public market. Perhaps some people are expecting one, especially as Gary is now married to Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone). The remnants of Caroline’s relationship with Michael are a facial scar and mild pleasantries; with Gary, a son named Jack (Barry Keoghan). She suspects mischief between Michael and the men in her family. “Michael hasn’t been here in over twenty years and then twice in as many days,” Caroline comments to an eye-averting Jack, who hides some tricks under his sleeves.
The conflict between Michael and Gary + Jack is ignited by history and fueled by misunderstandings, personal issues, the presence of nighttime rustlers looting for lamb limbs, and a whole lotta toxic masculinity. When they have a private curbside chat following the heated exchange at the market, Gary shares his resentment of Michael’s infliction on Caroline and threatens to tell his father about his mother’s planned departure prior to her death. Stung again by regret, Michael keeps his head down and leaves the rams be — that is, until push comes to shove.
In recent Irish dramas, the small-group disputes are illustrated with broad conceptual strokes akin to a generational fable. Brendan Gleeson’s character, Colm, in The Banshees of Inisherin is troubled by lasting legacies, but his fallout with Pádraic is as worthy as any tale passed down in a village lineage. In God’s Creatures, the omens leading up to a son’s death are mystifying, but can still be simplified into lessons to be learned. Bring Them Down is in line with these kinds of stories where characters are demarcated by their role (Michael, the troubled but loyal son), a tragic event (his mother’s death), and the current problem (been caught sheeping) that reveals a knot of complications under a supposedly idyllic life.
The narrative initially seems rooted in Michael’s perspective, whether through cinematographer Nick Boone’s illuminating isolation against landscape or a shaky first-person night vision when Michael is clambering around with fearful sheep among murdered flock on the ground. But as we reach his climactic action, the story then switches to Jack’s perspective. Sure, the both-sides aspect gives the story a wider breadth, but with a strong attraction to Michael’s story, switching focus cuts off circulation to an already interesting character. Director Christopher Andrews, who also wrote the story with Jonathan Hourigan, undermines Michael’s deserving spot in the center from what could have been a great Abbott vehicle. Keoghan is a fine actor, but Jack is not much more than the tossed-and-flicked representation of making our fathers proud — or safe.
It will behoove me not to bring up the parallels between Abbott’s characters in this film and Wolf Man. Generational trauma that feeds into a toxic complex, the taboo puns about the wolf in sheep’s clothing, and of course, Abbott a great actor. In this film, Michael’s deference to his father — quietly performing his father’s requests without challenge, responding to him in Gaelic (!) — is in discordance with what we know what Michael is capable of. The story is about anger, but it focuses on the smoldering effects after the explosion. What will Michael do? He will bring the sheep down the hill. What should he do? Maybe show the demons out.
Bring Them Down
2024
dir. Christopher Andrews
106 min.
Opens Friday, 2/7 @ Kendall Square Cinema and AMC Boston Common
