Christopher Abbott & Barry Keoghan Drama

You’ll never quite look at shepherding the same way after watching Bring Them Down, debuting writer-director Christopher Andrews’ pitch-dark drama about two Irish farmers engaged in a long and bloody turf war. Relentlessly bleak, with more livestock gore than any movie in recent memory — the film that comes the closest is fellow Irish director Billy O’Brien’s 2005 bovine thriller, Isolation — this violent first feature is carried more by leads Christopher Abbott and Barry Keoghan than by its dour storytelling.

The two compelling actors play herders struggling to get by in the muddy hills of west Ireland, where a longtime feud between their families degenerates into an all-out dogfight (or is that a sheep-fight?). The battle more or less kicks off as soon as the movie starts, and one problem with Bring Them Down is how we’re directly plunged into a conflict whose key players we know little about. The film not only hits the ground running, but also driving, crashing, dragging and stabbing its way from scene to scene.

A brief prologue does reveal a major trauma that occurred years earlier at the hands of Michael (Abbott), who gets into a car accident with his sister and mom after the latter claims she wants to divorce Michael’s dad, Ray (Colm Meaney). When we soon meet Ray a few scenes later, we can understand why: Domineering and altogether unpleasant, he spends his days stuck on a chair in the kitchen due to his bad knees, berating poor Michael whenever the latter walks through the door.

This is not a pleasant household — nor is the one just down the road, where Michael’s sister, Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone), is now married to a bitter and drunken shepherd named Gary (Paul Ready). Their son, Jack (Keoghan), is younger than Michael, and although the two are related they’re hardly friends. When an argument breaks out over a pair of sheep Michael claims were stolen from his herd, it quickly escalates into a conflict that gets wildly out of hand. Pocketknives, guns, multiple mutilations, one decapitation and yet another car crash are all tossed into the mix, with no feasible end in sight.

Bring Them Down is so grim that it can be something of a chore to sit through. But there’s enough tension and underlying adrenaline to keep one hooked for at least an hour. Andrews does a great job directing his two stars, who both bring some humanity to characters caught in a nasty cycle of violence and vengeance. Abbott immerses himself in a role that requires him to speak fluent Gaelic (perfectly credible to these untrained ears) not to mention get himself caked in layers of dirt and blood. Keoghan, who’s always a fascinating performer to watch, turns Jack into a fragile young man whose moral conscience has been worn down by so many years of poverty, isolation and toxic masculinity.

The latter seems to be the major force ruling over a godforsaken corner of Ireland where, in one of the film’s gorier sequences, dozens upon dozens of sheep are illicitly slaughtered so their hind legs can be sold for cheap meat. There’s something downright biblical about the way Andrews and cinematographer Nick Cooke (Sky Peals) capture the massacre and other difficult scenes, staging them against a backdrop of rolling hills that stretch to infinity, with the sun dipping in and out of the clouds.

But the director winds up taking his dark premise too far, losing credibility as his characters keep doing extremely dumb and destructive things. Beyond Caroline, who plans to skip town to Cork and perhaps take Jack with her, the others are condemned to a miserable existence that apparently hasn’t changed for centuries. (According to Ray, his family’s sheep have been grazing the hills for 500 years.) These people are literally and figuratively stuck in the mud, and the sad conclusion of Bring Them Down seems to be that the only way out is either to get killed or miraculously manage to survive.