Bring Them Down, Christopher Andrews’ feature length narrative debut, shows the beautiful Irish hills and mountains. Looks deceive here, but for the most part they only do so for a second before driving down towards misery. Barry Keoghan and Christopher Abbott play two Irish sheep farmers, both aware of the discord between their bellicose fathers. They expectedly serve as mirror images of each other especially when it comes to their lives at home. Michael (Abbott) feels the phantom presence of his mother and sister whom he killed (!?)  through a car ‘accident’. His father Ray knows nothing about that past event nor his wife’s intentions to take Michael away from him. Jack’s (Keoghan) mother Caroline (Nora Jeane Noone) is alive but she has constant arguments with her husband. That husband and Jack’s father Gary (Paul Ready) antagonizes everyone but maybe there’s some deeper motivations there.

A lot of elements give me a sense of ambivalence here but there’s still a lot of good here. It’s been a while since I saw Nora Jeane Noone in a film – she was in Brooklyn?! She still has that charisma that she had during The Magdalene Sisters even if she’s playing the ‘wife’ here. Bring Them Down treats its one female character and maybe some of the male ones as shallow archetypes. A less generous review of this film writes about how Keoghan overshadows Abbott which is slightly true. Perhaps, the writing treats both differently, as it makes Michael roam the fields nightly like a sad man. Either that or he and Ray yell at each other in Irish, a beautiful language even in rage. On the other hand, Jack has more dimension, a conscientious trickster, having levels that are within Keoghan’s wheelhouse.

Baroque interiors and dramatic landscapes are abundant in Bring Them Down, an entry into the farm feud subgenre. The aforementioned subgenre has its better entries but this one proves fascinating enough despite its writing and pacing. I write pacing because as much as I like Christopher Abbott, his farm scenes need to be seconds shorter. Conversely, this film differs from its subgenre because those other examples are uniformly giving the same menacing evels. On the other hand, the slow pacing and the long scenes also give the film some breathing room. There is time, for example, for it to show Caroline and Jack talk about going to Cork. The breathing room makes the characters think about hope, about maybe seeing the good side of their fathers’ enemies. And then the film’s percussive score begins again, alerting both the characters and the viewers of trouble lurking.

Bring Them Down comes to both theatres and to MUBI.