Bring Them Down: brutal Irish revenge thriller plays like a cruel Biblical parable

The burden a parent places on a child, and the question of how much they can be blamed for the damage caused by its weight, runs like a compressed nerve through director Christopher Andrews’s brutal Irish pulp pastoral Bring Them Down. At one point, Michael O’Shea (Christopher Abbott) actually carries his cantankerous, ailing father Ray (Colm Meaney) on his back to show him damage inflicted on their sheep in a mafia-style attack by the neighbouring Keeley family. The image of the piggy-backing parent echoes Imamura Shōhei’s The Ballad of Narayama (1983), in which a son leaves his mother on a mountain for a self-sacrificial death to increase the family’s chances of survival. Like that film, Bring Them Down plays out like a cruel parable, but Ray is not concerned by what’s good for his flock. His appetite for revenge will spur Michael on to become both sheep and wolf. This Connemara ‘El Jefe’ is out for a head.

As with most agricultural feuds, the O’Shea-Keeley beef is decades-long – stemming from Gary Keeley’s marriage to Michael’s childhood sweetheart Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone), who bears a scar from the car crash, years before, that’s seen in the film’s opening sequence. Hearing his mother’s plans to leave his abusive father, a young, troubled Michael responds by recklessly speeding down the road. Andrews films through the windshield, capturing the terror of whizzing down isolated country lanes, far from anyone who might hear you scream. Michael’s mother does not survive.                   

Andrews, a Cumbrian, had planned to set this debut feature about two feuding shepherd families in Yorkshire, but access to Irish funding transported the story to Ireland. To his credit, nothing about this version of rurality feels retrofitted. Bring Them Down was filmed around the boggy Wicklow mountains but is set in Connemara, and Andrews creates a sense of the place by having Michael and Ray communicate in the Irish language. For a film about the bloody repercussions of festering hatred, you couldn’t ask for a better dialect – there are devil-invoking curses for every scenario.

Connecticut-born Christopher Abbott had never spoken a word of Irish before the film, but, with help from dialect coach Peadar Cox, shows a grasp of the language. He also delivers a fairly convincing Irish accent, all while bringing a hair-trigger menace to Michael. Among other things, it’s Irish that sets Michael and his father apart from the English-speaking Keeleys, suggesting a greater connection with tradition, a dominance Ray savours when Jack Keeley (Barry Keoghan) and his father Gary (Paul Ready) are shown asking for – and being refused – passage through his land to help construct holiday homes. “Is that what you call ‘diversification’?” Ray sneers, turning the vitriol around his mouth like a Werther’s Original.

But Bring Them Down is all the more interesting for the language it strips away as it shifts between the perspectives of Michael and Jack. Abbott’s Michael, earthy and withdrawn, seems to disappear into the wide shots of cinematographer Nick Cooke, emerging like an anglerfish from a deep sea of darkness as he tends to his sheep using a headlamp. Barry Keoghan, effortless as the clammed-up, turbulent young Jack, seems suffocated by the landscape. Wherever he goes, tinny drum and bass follows; when he does speak, the words escape out of the side of his mouth like half-remembered daydreams. The only thing he seems sure of, and shares with Michael, is the dangerous need to impress his father. Eager to help pull his family out of debt, Jack practically sleepwalks into a violent plan formed by his reprobate cousin Lee (a break-out Aaron Heffernan, rarely seen without a chewed stick hanging from his snarl). They hack off the legs of the O’Sheas’ sheep to sell them on the black market. The creatures are left to bleed out, creating the harrowing scene Ray witnesses from his son’s back – a general surveying bodies on a battlefield.

The feud, the senseless act of violence and Keoghan’s presence will make some think of The Banshees of Inisherin (2022), but Andrews’s film has none of the verbose parody that keeps Martin McDonagh’s rural Irish characters at a cudgel’s length. It is closer to a transcendental version of Jim Sheridan’s The Field (1990), or Bob Quinn’s Poitín (1978), which similarly stripped away any notions of quaint countryside life to show an exaggerated version of Connemara toughness.

As Michael enacts revenge on the Keeleys, collecting a head to deliver to Ray in a gravel bag, it all descends into a Biblical bogland western. More than once, we see blood smeared prophetically on a door frame, but here no one – least of all the sheep – will emerge from the cycle of violence unscathed.

► Bring Them Down is in cinemas from 7 February across the UK and Ireland.