Bring Them Down

Set in present-day rural Ireland, “Bring Them Down” begins with a tense prologue from the past in which Michael O’Shea deliberately wrecks his car, killing his mother, and injuring his girlfriend Caroline, in response to the former confessing that she plans to leave his father. In this sequence, we never see Michael, we just see his mother and girlfriend in shots constituting his point-of-view. This is an interesting choice by director Christopher Andrews that seems to suggest Michael is trying to excise himself from his own memory. Indeed, in the present day, we learn the adult version of Michael (Christopher Abbott) still has not confessed to his paraplegic father Ray (Colm Meany) that he was responsible for his mother’s death. That inconvenient truth hangs over “Bring Them Down” and comes to a head when Michael and Ray’s drunken neighbor Gary (Paul Reddy), now married to Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone), and his son Jack (Barry Keoghan) steal a couple O’Shea rams and dare Michael to take them back, at least in part threatening to reveal the truth. There’s a solemnity to the proceedings that suggests something Biblical, but Andrews also infuses the proceedings with a pitch-black humor that subtly suggests it’s all a lot stupider than that, as if rendering the modern-day Men will literally X instead of going to therapy meme as an Epistle to the Ephesians. 

Though American, Abbott is one our foremost contemporary movie brooders, and the role of Michael is one big virtual brood. If he enjoys life as a shepherd, he never says it, just sort of herded along by his father as if he were a sheep himself. And when Caroline confesses that she, too, plans to leave their rural Irish town for a better opportunity in Cork, the way he asks how that will work makes it clear that still, all these years later, the idea of leaving is one that has never really registered. It’s a thought that clearly has never occurred to Jack either. At first, he comes across merely as an antagonist to Michael, but midway through, “Bring Them Down” doubles back without the viewer necessarily even noticing at first to unspool Jack’s parallel story to Michael’s. Played with an off-kilter emotional stuntedness by Keoghan, the hip-hop music featured in many of his scenes conveying an unexpected universality, he’s just a kid embittered by his folks’ failing marriage and under the thumb of his enraged father, putting him on the same plane as Michael.

That sounds painfully obvious. “We’re not so different, you and I,” as a thousand movie characters have said over the years. But Andrews, thankfully, does not overdo it, and does not force a confrontation in which the two characters realize it. He also counteracts it with that streak of dark humor, almost Peckinpah-like in the simultaneous insistence on violence and its futile and pitiful result. There is even a macabre joke tucked in there alluding to a title of a Peckinpah movie, a title so blatant I don’t want to give it away, but which lives a son confronting a father through a gruesome act rather than just, like, you know, sitting down and speaking to him about it. Ditto the climactic chase scene, which despite the Irish location reminded me of a Monte Hellman acid western anti-climax, an incredible bit of nigh never-ending folly that concludes, in a manner of speaking, with a hysterical apology. Nothing is truly wrapped up, no wounds are healed, and an ostensible final confrontation becomes nothing more, really, than lack of a better idea.