Critics reviews

Riddled with tension and terror, Bring Them Down is an experience that never lets up on its intensity.

There is some good landscape photography in “Bring Then Down,” as befits a film set in the Irish countryside. A couple of well-staged “action” moments also shine. Performances are well-judged as both Abbott and Keoghan are safe hands and intuitive performers.

Seeing some of Ireland’s finest actors at work makes Bring Them Down an exhilarating watch. Andrews’ script provides just the right amount of tension, and when it reveals its true intentions halfway through the runtime, the story truly comes alive.

Although hardly the first film to address toxic masculinity and the scourge of violence in small-town communities, this grimly compelling drama possesses a scruffy integrity... In Andrews’ vision, rural Ireland is as harsh as the Old West.

[Bring Them Down is] a drama that postures at importance, that sends out the signal of weighty concerns, without diving deep into a story about class, the burden of generational guilt, and the erosion of stability in traditional labor that’s just waiting there to be wrestled with.

The movie’s substance lies in its lack of stylization in its most violent moments. This make its vicious characters seem pathetic by the end, as though the roles they were pushed into by forces greater than themselves... have all but reduced them to squabbling children. It’s grimly funny, and hilariously sad.

Bring Them Down is an endurance test with no payoff... It’s occasionally compelling thanks to its haunting, almost otherworldly locations in Ireland. Mainly, though, what stands out are performances of the ever-intense Christopher Abbott, Nora-Jane Noone, and, most notably, Barry Keoghan.

The lengths Andrews goes to show us just how depraved this long-simmering feud has made these men does shock... Mostly, though, it does only that: Shock. Basic, trite, and without any hope for anything better ever happening.

Andrews has made a fraught feature debut that drags you through scenes of gruesome violence multiple times over, hammering you over the head with how bleak it all is to an almost comically unsubtle degree. The saving grace of the film’s world comes in the form of its two leads who, despite all the drudgery that they must push through, create something gripping.

Relentlessly bleak, with more livestock gore than any movie in recent memory — the film that comes the closest is fellow Irish director Billy O’Brien’s 2005 bovine thriller, Isolation — this violent first feature is carried more by leads Christopher Abbott and Barry Keoghan than by its dour storytelling.

The epicenter of Bring Them Down’s intensity, ultimately, is Abbott. With a far-off glare that’s darkened by anguish, ire, and desperation, the star proves an amazingly formidable presence, his every silent action and reaction exuding a messy tangle of emotions. Abbott is as good as he’s ever been (which is saying something), and he’s exceptionally complemented by Keoghan, whose Jack is another of the actor’s ramshackle, unruly Irish blokes.