Bring Me the Head of Alfred O’Garcia, perhaps, would be a more fitting title for Christopher Andrews’s Bring Them Down. This professionally made but ultimately monotonous drama of long-distilled hostilities counts as one of too many films that long to be considered displaced westerns.
Two sets of remote homesteaders stare angrily across the wilderness. Tough women dry their hands at open doors while waiting for the violence to erupt (or, more often here, desist).
Animals look nervy, as well they should. Few pseudo-westerns have involved such apocalyptic misery as befalls too many sheep in Christopher Andrews’s odd debut. The thing is certainly rich in atmosphere, but then so too is the average tyre fire.
We begin in the past with Susan Lynch (always welcome) playing a mother killed in a car driven by her son, Michael.
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Some years later, Michael (now the handsome American actor Christopher Abbott) is tending sheep on a soggy hunk of unlovely mountainside. His former girlfriend, Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone), scarred in the same accident, lives on another farm with her tearaway son, Jack (Barry Keoghan).
There is some odd casting here. Asking Abbott to adopt a rural Irish accent is one thing; asking him to deliver dialogue in the native language is another – though he manages well enough. Positioning Keoghan (about 30 during the shoot) as son to Noone (less than 10 years his senior) is also, shall we say, a bit of an ask.
These people are all fine actors and make the most of difficult briefs – Keoghan again gets a chance to do his dangerous oddball – but it is hard to shake the notion they were assigned their roles randomly.
The one person comfortably placed is the reliably funny Colm Meaney as Michael’s dad, forever downloading pictures of sheep on, apparently, dial-up internet.
There is a complex story here, one deliberately knotted by a switch in perspective deep into the action. Confusions about who is visiting what infelicity on whose sheep add smidgens of mystery. But the atmosphere has a bitterness and desolation that only some prehistoric class of offence could satisfactorily explain.
When film-makers aren’t asking people to read their films as westerns they are asking for them to be read as Greek tragedies. For all the commitment of the actors and brooding ambience of the film-making, Bring Them Down can’t quite sustain that comparison.
In cinemas from Friday, February 7th
