Pitch-dark drama portrays a bridge that can’t be mended

Irish farmers collide in Bring Them Down’ while The Fire Inside’ dares to ask what happens after victory. However, September S’ is laughably jarring, says Clarisse Loughrey

- Clarisse Loughrey

Bring Them Down’s spiral into catastrophic violence begins with a broken bridge – two broken bridges, in fact. One is made of wood or stone and damaged to such a degree that sheep farmer Gary (Paul Ready) can’t afford to repair it. Now that he’s unable to move his livestock down from the hill into safer pastures, his entire livelihood has come under threat. The second bridge is of the emotional sort, a bond between neighbours in the rural west of Ireland, a place where community ties are so vital that a single fissure risks total collapse.

Michael (Christopher Abbott) carries a secret on his back, as heavy as the rams he throws over his shoulders and ferries between fields. It’s about the car crash that killed his mother. We see it but don’t fully understand its context. He cares for his paraplegic father Ray (Colm Meaney), though the man’s largely left at home to marinate in his own resentment. They speak to each other in Irish. You get the sense the language will die with Ray. Down the road lives Gary and his wife, Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone), who bears a scar on her cheek. She was in the crash, too. Her teenage son, Jack (Barry Keoghan), is directionless and desperate for opportunity – even if it means violating the unspoken moral codes shared between sheep farmers.

Violence, under these circumstances, isn’t a foregone conclusion. Yet in Christopher Andrews’s stark, haunted debut – anchored by two soulfully frayed performances by Abbott and Keoghan – violence becomes the only language left to speak when shame, resentment and desperation have stripped the words right out of these people’s mouths.

"Bring Them Down’ operates with a kind of ruthless empathy. It is shaped like a crime thriller, yet has the sharp ache of tragedy"

Andrews’s film, which he both wrote and directed, operates with a kind of ruthless empathy.