Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Irish rural drama Bring Them Down pursues an inexorable logic of retribution and calamity, like a primal Western with a streak of Jacobean tragedy. Offsetting this is a narrative sophistication that is slippery and intriguing, but a touch mechanical in its constant, calculated wrongfooting.The debut feature by writer-director Christopher Andrews, this is a tale of bitter enmity that stems from a car crash and the bilious influence of a sheep-farming patriarch, Ray (Colm Meaney). Years after the crash, Ray’s son Michael (Christopher Abbott) carries the weight of guilt and ill-feeling on his back, just as throughout the film he bodily heaves sheep and people.As this suggests, the film makes somewhat laborious play with metaphor and literalness: the title refers to recalling the flock from grazing grounds, but also suggests merciless revenge. In this context, when Ray orders Michael to bring him someone’s head, he might well be taken at his word. The air is hot with resentment as Michael’s former girlfriend Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone) is married to another farmer with whom she has a son, Jack (Barry Keoghan).There are multiple severings, human and animal — as well as crashes, confrontations and stalkings across dark hillsides . . . The film lays on its repetitions thickly and knowingly, and, at half-time, loops back to replay events from a different perspective, showing us what we have misunderstood — and the dire results of the characters’ own misunderstandings.Abbott (recently in Poor Things and Wolf Man) confirms his forte for enigmatic moodiness, projecting vulnerability and a simmering derangement beneath Michael’s lugubrious taciturnity. As for Keoghan, he’s as compelling as ever, although at 32, is perhaps slightly stretching his ability to play mercurial youths. This is a clever film, and an atmospheric one, but its elaborate accumulation of cataclysms ultimately feels like one thing after — or before, or during — another.★★★☆☆In UK cinemas from February 7
