‘Bring Them Down’: Toronto Review

Dir: Christopher Andrews. Eire/UK/Belgium. 2024. 106mins 

Author-director Christopher Andrews’ function debut exists in a world beset by tragedy and previous wounds which have by no means healed. Starring Christopher Abbott as a sheep farmer haunted by a previous mistake, Carry Them Down follows the person’s rising conflict with a youthful rival, performed with ragged edge by Barry Keoghan, that has been build up over years. Though hardly the primary movie to handle poisonous masculinity and the scourge of violence in small-town communities, this grimly compelling drama possesses a scruffy integrity.

In Andrews’ imaginative and prescient, rural Eire is as harsh because the Outdated West

Carry Them Down premieres as a Toronto Particular Presentation earlier than travelling to Incredible Fest and the London Movie Competition. Mubi might be dealing with for a number of territories, together with the UK and US, and Keoghan’s star energy will possible assist on the arthouse. 

Set in distant, rural west Eire, the image stars Abbott as Michael, who raises sheep on the household farm the place he lives together with his raging, ailing father Ray (Colm Meany). Years in the past, Michael was behind the wheel when his mom advised him she was leaving his father. The ensuing accident killed her and left Michael’s girlfriend Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone), who was within the again seat, with everlasting facial scars. Caroline has since moved on and married fellow farmer Gary (Paul Prepared), and the couple’s son Jack (Keoghan) is aggressive with Michael. 

Along with his debut, Andrews, a 2019 Display screen Star Of Tomorrow, has little room for compassion or romanticising his characters’ more and more violent tendencies. As soon as Jack steals two of Michael’s prized sheep, attempting to go them off as his personal, hostilities between the households rapidly escalate. In Andrews’ imaginative and prescient, rural Eire is as harsh because the Outdated West.

One of many movie’s supporting characters notes that Ray is content material to sit down in his distress, an outline that applies to simply about everybody we meet in Carry Them Down. There’s little in the best way of humour or lightness as Michael and Jack ratchet up their conflict, with Andrews ultimately pausing the narrative as a way to replay sure key sequences from one other character’s perspective. An inevitable fatalism hovers over the proceedings. Ceaselessly, Carry Them Down makes this feud really feel practically biblical, the bloodshed stunning and wholly missing in catharsis. Andrews doesn’t select sides in a battle full of offended, cussed males.

As could be anticipated, although, that narrowly centered tonal scope offers the movie little room to breathe. At one level, the exasperated Caroline, who nonetheless harbours emotions for Michael and has grown dissatisfied together with her marriage, confesses that she’s suffocating on this small city, and viewers could really feel equally. Andrews paints this group as certainly one of limitless struggling – even the sheep should not immune from the cruelty — and the writer-director’s relentless pursuit of his thematic factors can simply succumb to overkill. 

What saves this uneven materials is the actors’ dedicated, anguished turns. Keoghan could also be doing a variation on his efficiency within the extra nuanced The Banshees Of Inisherin, however his portrayal of a budding brute is suitably sobering. In such movies as this, it’s typically as much as the ensemble’s principal feminine performer to inject a little bit humanity – as reductive because the trope could be, Noone is nonetheless transferring because the bodily and emotionally scarred Caroline. Noone and Abbott convey a young rapport, hinting at a love that was destroyed throughout a second of mindless rage. The brooding Abbott ensures that his character’s each ugly, violent act afterward is a mirrored image of his grief over that previous sin. Michael is aware of he can’t be forgiven, and is doomed to take out his ache on anybody unfortunate sufficient to cross his path.