Writer-director Chris Andrews’ Bring Them Down is as dour and grim as movies tend to get, but it also curiously forgets to give the viewer much reason to care. Great films have been made throughout history about unlikeable people doing terrible things to each other, but at their best they show a reflection of society or the human condition. Bring Them Down is just bleak for the sake of being bleak, and while one couldn’t accuse Andrews of not achieving his goals, the result is something that’s more dull than unsettling. It’s potent, but empty misery.
Michael (Christopher Abbott) is singlehandedly trying to keep his family’s shepherding legacy afloat, while trying to care for his cantankerous, infirm father (Colm Meaney). Michael and his pa get a call from Gary (Paul Ready), a rival and fellow shepherd who’s in dire financial straits, saying that two of their rams were found dead and diseased on his property. Gary’s son, Jack (Barry Keoghan), says he disposed of the rams’ bodies so they didn’t infect any other animals. When Michael discovers Jack and Gary were lying, it awakens something sinister inside him, kicking off a bloody tit-for-tat feud that surely won’t end well for either family.
Bring Them Down portrays rural Ireland as a picturesque land of natural beauty populated by emotionally ugly, rotten people that are stubborn to their core. Staying there seems to guarantee a lifetime of hardship and pain, and any attempts to rise above one’s status are almost certain to fail. Michael is haunted by poor decisions in his past (that’s an understatement, but I’m trying to avoid spoilers). His dad literally can’t move. Jack’s daydreams of doing something better with his life will require him to stoop to everyone else’s level of depravity. Gary’s attempts to diversify his portfolio through real estate development are tanking. Michael’s ex-girlfriend, Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone), has been living with Gary and Jack, but is looking to take a job in the big city, a decision that feels like it has been decades in the offing. Nothing about the characters’ situations in Bring Them Down are pleasant, but at least it Andrews’ has some stunning images and basic motivations for his characters to be awful to each other.
But that’s all Andrews really has outside of some committed performances from Abbott and Keoghan, the latter of whom gets the refreshing change of pace to play the less psychotic and off putting half of the family feud. One could stretch a bit to suggest that Andrews is trying to pull off some sort of parable about the plight of the agrarian economy, but the material is so thin that it’s hard to take such subtext seriously. The story unfolds in a non-linear fashion, which sounds neat, but is actually a detriment. So many of Andrews’ big “reveals” would’ve played better had everything simply played out naturally. Bring Them Down overthinks its own simplicity, and downplays the arc of its own characters for the sake of rug pulls that never fully land because the whole thing only swings between “depressing,” “really depressing,” and “just plain nasty.”
Add to that a strange hand drum and techno score that’s certainly a choice, and one is left with a curiously flat, but desperately insistent movie. Bring Them Down revels in gore and envelope pushing, but to what end? It’s certainly not to entertain or chill the viewer to their core, and by the time Andrews’ film wraps up, the viewer isn’t compelled to think about it any further. It ends and all one is left with is a sense of malaise, not just because they watched a film that can be difficult to sit through, but because they just feel so empty inside that it almost doesn’t matter what they saw.
Bring Them Down opens in select theatres on Friday, February 7, 2025. It will be streaming on MUBI at a later date.
