'Bring Them Down': Barry Keoghan, Christopher Abbott lead dark, tense and brutal drama

Yahoo

24-02-2025

Barry Keoghan and Christopher Abbott star in Chris Andrews' dark drama Bring Them Down (now in theatres). Set in rural Ireland, the film follows two battling farming families, with tensions escalating to the point of brutal violence.
"There's this idea of collective responsibility, of people shepherding the same land, and they look out for one another, but then, they've been doing this for hundreds of years, same families, and they end up with these tiny little beefs that then can escalate and then become generational disputes," Andrews told Yahoo Canada. "So it felt like a really ripe space to find drama and conflict. ... Once you started the war, what does it take to finish the war."
The film begins with Michael (Abbott) in a car with his mother, Peggy (Susan Lynch), and his girlfriend, Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone). Michael's mother tells him that she's leaving his father and his reaction was to start speeding, ultimately ending in an accident that killed his mother and injured his girlfriend, leaving Caroline with a scar down her face.
Years later, Michael is living with his demanding and ailing father, while Caroline married Gary (Paul Ready), and they have a son Jack (Keoghan). Michael has taken over his family's sheep herding business, having to negotiate land with Gary as the neighbouring farmer.
But when Jack reignites old tensions between the families, the violence between them escalates to a terrifying level.
Andrews' film feels particularly dark, with the filmmaker putting the audience in a position to sit in the devastation and brutality of the story.
"If there's something brutal, I like that to feel brutalized. If it's upsetting, I like it to feel upsetting," the filmmaker said. "You want to take those to an extreme. I feel that's what cinema can do. ... When you come out you feel like, 'That was great and I feel terrible.'"
For Keoghan, the actor was attracted to playing a character that had this intense fragility.
"It was a breath of fresh air to play a character with innocence and with bravado, and wit, all of these layers that he's confused by," Keoghan said. "And he's figuring himself out, and he's trying to represent his family's name and impress his father."
"As an actor, ... I'm always looking for range. I'm always looking to prove people, mainly myself, but to show that I can go from one side to the other."
But a core element of Bring Them Down is the relationship between Michael and his father, particularly with Michael keeping the secret of the exact circumstances that led to the car crash that killed his mother.
"As a man, that father-son dynamic is always going to be an important story point in anyone's life," Abbott said. "And for these characters specifically, they live together and he's a caretaker, but yet there's this secret that's being held in the movie, but has been held for years between them."
"How do you talk to someone you're related to, a loved one, when you're carrying that sort of weight? And the truth is, you don't talk much, or you only talk about the simple things. ... And the beauty of what's not being said is really, I find, quite moving in this movie."
Abbott stressed that an actor can't "play trauma," because a traumatic event in someone's life isn't what they're talking about each and every day years later, but for Abbott it's about "instinct" in each scene.
"My favourite actors to work with [are] the ones that are present and in the moment," he said. "I don't like to get too caught up in backstory. I just know it and then trust it, and then go from there."
Andrews shared that, after losing his father, he was interested in the idea of the impact someone can have when they're not there.
"I lost my father when I was quite young and the idea of his presence still being there over me as I grew up, ... I found it kind of amazing," Andrews said. "That somebody who wasn't there ... had this huge influence on who I was and how people saw me."
Throughout the film, Andrews plays with a lot of allegorical elements, best exemplified with Michael constantly travelling up and down a mountain, including transporting lost and hurt sheep.
Andrews explained that he was working with twisting the parable of the good shepherd, including using perpetual motion in the film to add a propulsive feeling.
As Abbott highlighted, there's this repetition that's handled with a beautiful subtly.
"I think [Chris Andrews deserves] a lot of credit, because there's so many allegorical things that happen in the movie that I feel like, in other movies I might have seen, really sort of beat you over the head with it," Abbott said, "And it's so subtle, those themes and things that are happening, ... those structures in the which the movie is edited and handled."
But one of the most interesting evaluations in Bring Them Down is how Andrews developed the small number of women in the story, and how the toxicity of these men impact their lives.
"Growing up, it was being in environments and in communities where men don't speak, they do lots of things side-by-side, and nobody really discusses what they're feeling," Andrews said. "And the women that I grew up around, ... they sort of sit face-to-face much more, and they're able to move around different topics and ... get things out into the open, and have a better sense of themselves and mindfulness."
"But on top of that, they were always much more constricted by the environment. It was much more difficult for them to get jobs and ... to educate themselves. ... Peggy is making that decision at quite an older space in her life that she's going to move and take herself out of that community, which is a really big decision and not an easy thing to do. ... And then Caroline has found herself sort of trapped in this space, but the opportunities for her to move are greater."
Andrews added that he was interested in exploring the "friction" in Caroline's story, where she could go out and lead a different life, but has made the decision to be a mother and wife at the farm, and is navigating the realities of that world.
"She's got to this point in her life where she isn't included. She's excluded," Andrews said. "So she has no identity. She's not allowed to be on the inside, and just how debilitating and cruel that is."
"She's also seeing that she's been infected by this sort of male toxicity and this inability to communicate. ... She finds that she's adopting the same kind actions that they have, ... of rage and violence, which, when you have no agency, is quite a default setting to go to, to try and make yourself feel like you have some power and some control over the situation you were in. But it doesn't, it just exacerbates the problem that you have."