Christopher Andrews' feature film debut stars Christopher Abbott and Barry Keoghan as family rivals trapped by circumstance.

By Siddhant Adlakha

A brutally violent directorial debut, Christopher Andrews’ rural Irish drama “Bring Them Down” veers between pitch-black humor and piercing melancholy. A tale of fathers, sons and mutilated sheep, it plays with narrative point of view in “Rashomon” style, but keeps pressing questions about masculinity and cycles of grief just off-screen. Fittingly, like its emotionally limited male characters, it doesn’t confront these ideas head-on, instead letting them quietly build in the form of a simmering blood feud that feels all-encompassing in the moment but that, upon stepping back, reveals a pathetic quality.

A brief but unsettling prologue—told through alternating chaos and silence—reveals a car crash. Michael (Christopher Abbott), driven off the road in a fit of uncontrollable emotion upon learning his mother was planning to leave his father, killed his mother in the passenger seat. His then-girlfriend Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone) was also in the car and was left with a telltale scar on the left side of her face, a pointed embodiment of the way women bear the brunt of men’s unbridled rage.