Bring Them Down, review: Barry Keoghan’s bleak modern-day western is a real downer

This primal tale of two feuding farmers marks director Christopher Andrews as a name to watch. But Tourism Ireland may not be thrilled

3/5
The Irish thriller Bring Them Down starts out bleak – with a car accident caused by the main character, which kills his mother and permanently scars his then girlfriend. If anything, it’s downhill from there. A midway outrage against a flock of sheep, perpetrated by greedy rustlers, yields some of the most soul-deadening images – and sounds – in recent cinema. It’s a dead-of-night massacre in mist, punctuated by bleats of primal agony.
Show this film to anyone planning to visit Ireland with a song in their heart, and they may turn white. Written and directed by first-timer Christopher Andrews, it’s akin to a tough modern western. Connemara wasn’t meant to be the setting: Andrews based the story on his farming experiences in Cumbria, but took advantage of Ireland’s generous tax credits to resituate it, with literally zero concessions to whatever the tourist board may have had in mind.
The habitually excellent Christopher Abbott keeps the first half on an edgy simmer as Michael, an embattled shepherd tumbling into a bloody feud, when he realises that a neighbouring farm, in equally dire straits, is plotting to defraud and rob him. Abbott keeps us keenly invested, at least up to the point where things get well and truly psychotic, about halfway. 
When Barry Keoghan, playing a farm hand on the other side named Jack, gets his turn to dominate in the second half, he’s playing a snivelling runt who has already forfeited any sympathy we might be asked to harbour. Keoghan, a late replacement for Paul Mescal, may be nearing an expiry point for playing feckless eejits half his age; he’s not bad, but the film’s energy levels actually dissipate when we get his point of view.
Andrews leans here on the skill of editor George Cragg (I Am Not a Witch), whose contribution is major. His cuts keep the filmmaking lean and sinuous, even when the script can be a little bald. It’s very obvious to us that sheep farming in Ireland must be a sore test of any marriage, since Jack’s squabbling parents (played with fine grit by Nora-Jane Noone and Paul Ready) repeat the exact paradigm that Michael’s once did. 
Laughs are in generally short supply, though I did guffaw at hearing Colm Meaney, who plays Michael’s disabled father, described with venomous precision as a “turnip headed c___” by one of their ill-wishers. The film brings us down, as well as letting itself down somewhat – a late scuffle in a peat bog is poorly motivated, the ending too vague. But the jangling escalations of the first half still mark Andrews out as a name to watch.
105 min; screening as part of the London Film Festival
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