‘Bring Them Down’ Review: Barry Keoghan and Christopher Abbott Star in Uneven Drama
Christopher Abbott’s towering lead performance elevates Bring Them Down from petering out, but the film itself leaves a lot to be desired when it unjustifiably switches perspectives halfway through.
Christopher Andrews’ feature directorial debut, Bring Them Down, features moments of intense dramatic tension during its opening scene, as a rivalry is set between two shepherding families. Michael (Christopher Abbott) oversees his father’s (Colm Meaney) farm since he is chairbound and can no longer perform manual tasks. Things seem to be relatively stable as we meet him until neighboring farm owners Jack (Barry Keoghan) and Gary (Paul Ready) tell Michael that two of his prized rams that disappeared were found dead in front of their home. The inciting incident occurs when Michael visits the two at their house and finds that his rams are alive and about to be sold to another owner.
This sets the conflict in motion since Michael wants his prized animals back, whilst Gary will kill them before he will ever give them back to Michael. As he returns home, Michael is attacked by both Gary and Jack, who try to crash his car over but instead end up getting in an accident. The rest of the movie unfolds through Michael's and Jack’s internal perspectives, alternating during a pivotal moment before heading to its conclusion. And for a while, Andrews’ film is a gripping, almost devastating tale of morality that questions this feud through Michael’s guilt, not only in causing the death of her mother but permanently scarring her ex, Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone), who has since remarried with Gary.
When Andrews daringly switches the narrative, the movie begins to severely falter and lose what it had so tightly introduced before, especially with one spectacularly riveting turn at the front and center of it all. Abbott gives another outstanding performance in 2025, though one far more complex than the one he delivered in Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man. A man of few words, Michael prefers to keep his emotions to himself since he carries a considerable baggage he doesn’t want to resurface, even though the scar on Caroline’s face reminds him of this fact upon every visit and torments him violently.
Every exchange he has with his father (Meaney, while excellent, is sadly underutilized) is also filled with sorrow that none of the characters are actively willing to express it directly. Michael’s dad is far too tired of arguing or even bringing up the past when his son’s accident has permanently damaged the family to a point of no return. He has to wake up every day in perpetual physical and psychological pain, with his son overseeing the business, while that son is the one responsible for a pain that will never go away. Each dialogued scene with the two (in Irish) is filled with so much unease that one has to peer through a mountain of layers to understand how they truly feel toward each other. Once you realize that, subsequent scenes with the two are even more challenging to watch.
On the flip side, none of the sequences with Jack, Gary, and Caroline work very much. All of them are telegraphed and mawkish, with Keoghan giving one of the most unimpressive turns of his career. While it’s certainly admirable that he’s continuing work in Irish cinema and chose a character that will allow him to speak his native tongue, Jack is a complete shell of an intriguing antagonist who shares a morally grey kinship with Michael that never gets explored to its fullest potential.
Even by shifting perspectives in its second half, Andrews has difficulty explaining why it was necessary to suddenly examine Jack’s arc from his point-of-view when the crux of the film’s dramatic power is on Michael. Bring Them Down opens with his mother’s accident, which has a lasting effect on how he interacts with his father and even people around him. When he walks with his herd of sheep on the street and is honked at by a driver, he proceeds to destroy his front lights in a fit of violent rage that silently boils inside him and is now too powerful to eliminate. That’s an interesting thematic underpinning that sadly goes nowhere, even with a cruel denouement that seems to build upon what Andrews treats in his runtime as both protagonists get violently punished, yet we feel very little for both of them.
In switching the subjectivity of the narrative, Andrews repeats scenes we have already seen before, now through Jack, yet they add nothing new to our understanding of the conflict and the narrative (unlike how RaMell Ross alternated between Elwood and Turner through an internal/external communication with itself in Nickel Boys). They only exist to stretch the runtime a bit because he realized that he is at an impasse when alternating how the story would be perceived. Had he solely focused on Michael, perhaps the viewing experience would have been far more enriching than the half-baked and undercooked drama we have here.
When Bring Them Down ultimately finishes with a chase between Michael and Jack, one wishes their rivalry was far better explored than the resulting product. The final clash has almost zero impact on the story, and the film’s last shot, while potent with meaning, seems to arrive with a thud. It’s a shame since Abbott genuinely impresses and is so good that I wish the entire movie was about him. But in making one single narrative decision that could’ve benefitted the film had it been done right, Andrews sadly sinks Bring Them Down into the land of forgettable oblivion.