‘Bring Them Down’: Toronto Review

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

Author-director Christopher Andrews’ characteristic debut exists in a world beset by tragedy and outdated wounds which have by no means healed.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 struggle with a youthful rival, performed with ragged edge by Barry Keoghan, that has been increase over years. Though hardly the primary movie to deal with 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In Andrews’ imaginative and prescient, rural Eire is as harsh because the Outdated West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 Implausible Fest and the London Movie Pageant. Mubi will likely be dealing with for a number of territories, together with the UK and US, and Keoghan’s star energy will doubtless 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 along with his raging, ailing father Ray (Colm Meany). Years in the past, Michael was behind the wheel when his mom instructed 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. 

Together with his debut, Andrews, a 2019 Display 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 In Andrews’ imaginative and prescient, rural Eire is as harsh because the Outdated West.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 take a seat in his distress, an outline that applies to only 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 struggle, with Andrews ultimately pausing the narrative to be able 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 surprising and wholly missing in catharsis. Andrews doesn’t select sides in a battle crammed with offended, cussed males.

As may be anticipated, although, that narrowly targeted 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 considered one of infinite struggling – even the sheep are usually 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 just a little humanity – as reductive because the trope may 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.