This is the world of the new drama Bring Them Down, where grim, angry men in bad situations always make them worse. The film stars Barry Keoghan and Christopher Abbott.Patrick Redmond/MUBI
EXTERIOR: SHEEP MARKET – DAY. Jack, gormless (Barry Keoghan), stands inside a pen showing off his rams, the pricey lifeblood of any flock. Jack’s neighbour Michael, eyes blazing (Christopher Abbott), hops the railing into the pen. Jack knows why; still, he pushes at him. Michael pushes back. The sheep push into each other. Michael grabs a particular ram by the horns and points to its coat: His blue brand is visible, incompletely hidden under a new pink one. “These are my two rams you told me were dead,” Michael says.
This is the world of the new drama Bring Them Down, where grim, angry men in bad situations always make them worse. It’s rural Ireland, present day, but its male mores and behaviours are unchanged since the Stone Age. The title refers to bringing sheep in off the mountain, but bringing each other down – bitterly, and then gruesomely – is all these men know how to do. It’s what their fathers did to them, after all.
The scene continues: Jack calls for his father, Gary (Paul Ready), who’s broke and hiding it. Gary is married to Michael’s ex, so their competitiveness has history. Other men push together outside the pen, faces set. They can all see Michael’s brand. No one will be buying Gary’s sheep today. Gary orders Jack to put them back in the truck – including the two disputed rams. Michael blocks them. “You’re not taking them,” Gary says. The men stand toe to toe, eyeballing each other. The sheep mill about blindly. The other men still watch, still silent.
Christopher Abbott as Michael in Bring Them Down. Halfway through the film, the point of view switches from Michael’s to Jack’s, filling in errors of judgement, reinforcing how neither man can see the other’s perspective.Patrick Redmond/MUBI
Jack, herding the sheep, shoves Michael into Gary – maybe accidentally, maybe not. Their chests bump; their faces are now an inch apart. A fight feels imminent. An unseen man yells, “That’s not happening here. The two of you, out.” Michael holds for a beat longer, grimacing with repressed rage, then pushes past Gary out of the pen. Walking to his truck, he smacks his hands together and mutters expletive-heavy threats. But he lost this one, and he knows it.
Unfortunately, neither man will stop here. Cruelties will escalate, until a dispute that began with a locked fence ends in slaughter. Interestingly, halfway through the film, the point of view switches from Michael’s to Jack’s, filling in errors of judgement, reinforcing how neither man can see the other’s perspective, and showing us that “the inevitable” didn’t have to be.
“Both men are characters of circumstance,” Abbott, 38, said during a joint interview with Keoghan during last September’s Toronto International Film Festival. (His past credits include Girls and Poor Things.) “When you’re living your life, you’re not constantly thinking about past trauma. When you’re acting out, you’re not thinking about toxic masculinity. You’re just doing it.
“It’s also a question of environment,” he continues. “A lot of open space, not many people to talk to, a lot of time alone. A lot of time not getting therapy.” (This is the first time therapy pops up in this conversation, but it won’t be the last. Abbott and Keoghan are definitely not Michael and Jack.)
In Bring Them Down, cruelties escalate until a dispute that began with a locked fence ends in slaughter.Patrick Redmond/MUBI
“These lads are so small-minded,” Keoghan, 32, agrees. (Among other credits, he starred in Saltburn and earned an Oscar nod for The Banshees of Inisherin.) “They don’t have the perspective of the bigger world. A lot of their actions are from fear and confusion. Jack bases his personality on what he sees on the internet and TikTok, and what his father did. Not until the end does he make a choice based on what he feels.”
“Are you open to talking about your own fathers?” I ask.
“No,” Abbott says, and means it. “That’s for my therapist.”
“You’ll need half an hour with me,” Keoghan says.
I don’t know much about Abbott’s childhood in Connecticut, but Keoghan’s in Dublin was rough: After his mother died of a heroin overdose when he was 12, he spent seven years in 13 foster homes, and also lived with his grandmother and aunt. “In a lot of my movies, like Banshees or The Killing of a Sacred Deer, I’m looking for a father or mother figure,” Keoghan says. “I’m not searching for a parental feeling consciously when I’m choosing a movie, but I see myself doing that. It must speak to me on a deep level.
“I have the privilege of doing therapy now,” he continues. “I’m not living under the idea that therapy is weak. Therapy helps me. Making movies is therapeutic as well.”
Unlike his penned-in character, Keoghan is trying to break a cycle. He has a 2-year-old son, Brando, with his ex-girlfriend Alyson Kierans. “I don’t have that father figure to base on what being a father is, so my relationship with my child is quite unorthodox,” he says. “I’m trying to figure it out.” (That quest may have led him to play Bug, a highly untraditional father who had his daughter when he was 14, in Andrea Arnold’s criminally underseen Bird, which also premiered at TIFF.)
Both men admit to being vulnerable to the increasingly hostile tone of social media. “You can’t afraid to be raw,” Abbott says. “You should be –”
“But TikTok and the likes are ruining it,” Keoghan jumps in. “People judging my movies on my appearance, slamming how I look.” He doesn’t let it affect his work: “It doesn’t leak into when action is called. But it’s bullying.”
Dealing with corrosive fame and playing toxic masculinity takes its toll on these sensitive men. “We all bring it home,” Keoghan says. “It’s how I work anyway. I’m trying to get to a state of emotion that I can bring to the surface. Sometimes that can just wad up inside you, and you can be left with it on days off or after the shoot. Sometimes I ask myself, ‘Why did I do that?’ I almost feel like I sold out myself for someone else’s benefit.
“That’s why I’m quite selective in what I choose,” he concludes. “Because you have to channel a lot of stuff in acting. And you have to sit with that stuff, and be able to manage it, control it. That’s why therapy helps. And the reward is, you get to be brave, and figure yourself out.”
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