Bring Them Down

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.

It’s a serious, sombre film about something else — something, perhaps, very English that is fully smothered here.

An impressive first feature from Christopher Andrews... a bruising tale of vengeance accompanied by a savage, percussive score by Hannah Peel that sounds as though it was played on scrap metal and abandoned farm machinery.

The burden a parent places on a child, and the question of how much they can be blamed for the damage caused by its weight, runs like a compressed nerve through director Christopher Andrews’s brutal Irish pulp pastoral Bring Them Down.

Unnerving and tense, Mr. Andrews’s script is tinged with a film noir appreciation for the all-corrosive effects of man’s iniquity. No one has clean hands here, and no one seems destined for a happy ending.

Bring Them Down is a granular depiction of traditional rural life that quickly descends into a toxic cycle of violence.

Gorgeously crafted, unbearably tense, and seething with quiet rage, this is not for the faint of heart. It's a tale of fragile masculinity, generational bitterness, and the corrosive nature of vengeance.

Christopher Abbott has been putting in reliably good work while flying relatively under the radar for almost two decades. Bring Them Down is the opposite of a showy performance, but it deserves to bring him to a wider audience.

Well-shot and acted, Bring Them Down holds interest. But the kind of modern-day Jacobean tragedy it aims for is ultimately beyond the grasp of a scenario lacking that grandeur.

Playing like Peckinpah's homage to Shakespeare, Bring Them Down bludgeons its classically dramatic conflicts with brute force, but is neither pulpy nor cathartic, caught in the crosshairs of genre and tragedy.