The long shadow of a tragic accident looms over the story of two feuding farming families in this gripping debut from director Christopher Andrews.
Years ago, Peggy (Susan Lynch) chose an inopportune moment – a country drive – to announce to her children, Michael (Christopher Abbott) and Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone), that she was going to live with her sister, leading to a crash that killed her and left Caroline with a terrible facial scar. Since then, Michael, the driver on that fateful day, has transmuted his guilt into loyalty to his ailing, Gaelic-speaking father Ray (Colm Meaney) and their struggling sheep farm. Caroline has married Ray’s nemesis Gary (Paul Ready), but is now planning her own departure, hoping to take their wayward son, Jack (Barry Keoghan), to start a new life in Cork.
But simmering tensions, resentments and grievances between the two families are about to explode into a cycle of violence. It’s sparked by Jack’s theft of two of Ray and Michael’s rams, and a spate of horrific sheep mutilations that have decimated their prized flock.
What unfolds in Andrews’ screenplay, co-written with Jonathan Hourigan, has the grim inevitability of a Greek tragedy, no less violent than the feud at the centre of The Banshees of Inisherin, albeit without that film’s Irish black humour.
Although set in rural Ireland, rather than Appalachia, this tale of feuding farmers puts one in mind of the legendary rivalry between the Hatfield and McCoy families, whose bitter blood feud is rumoured to have begun with the theft of a prized hog.
As bleak and chilly as a winter’s night in the Irish hinterland
Yet the intertwined – and intermarried – fates of Bring Them Down’s sheep farmers, hidebound and unable to communicate with each other in anything approaching a healthy way, feel less like a western than a Gaelic version of a Kurosawa film. The feeling is enhanced by the cut-up storytelling (shades of Rashomon), and a sparse, dread-inducing skin-drum score (by Northern Irish composer Hannah Peel) that eschews the Irish bodhrán drum in favour of percussive sounds from farther afield, particularly Southeast Asia.
Despite occasional suspicions that the film’s counter-chronological conceit is being employed more as narrative trickery than necessity, this is still a hugely impressive debut, auguring well for Andrews’ future.
What really seals the deal, however, is the powerful performances across the board; a powerhouse Keoghan turn can be taken for granted these days, but Abbott (Wolf Man) has had an eye for directors and scripts that dates back to his debut, Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene. And it would be unfair not to give major plaudits to Noone, Meaney and especially Ready – the latter playing a long way from his milquetoast Motherland persona – for their part in an outstanding ensemble.
Bring Them Down is as bleak and chilly as a winter’s night in the Irish hinterland, and every bit as bracing.
In UK cinemas Fri Feb 7.