by Oscar O’Sullivan

Bring Them Down

The first of two new releases I watched in the Everyman last night, and certainly the better of the two. Bring Them Down is a rural Irish revenge parable that hits some dynamic highs but stumbles over a heavy-handed and half-hearted moral message. Michael (Christopher Abbot) is a tense, hard-working sheep farmer with trauma in his past – as we learn in the contextless and jarring opening flashback where he loses his temper and causes a crash that kills his mother and disfigures his girlfriend Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone). Fast-forward to the film’s present-day and Caroline is married to the owner of the neighbouring farm, while Michael is alone with his crippled, foul-tempered father Ray (Colm Meaney). When Caroline’s son Jack (Barry Keoghan) steals two rams from Michael’s flock, it kicks off an escalating series of reprisals that drive Michael to the brink of madness. The film is crunchy, raw and tactile, with the sound design especially creating flinch-worthy moments of physical violence. The Irish landscape is put to good use too, isolating Michael on these vast mountain vistas as he tirelessly carries out his duties as shepherd. Michael is a lonely character who carries a lot of guilt and rage, flaws exacerbated by his only regular human contact being his stubborn, pig-headed father. He’s pushed onwards both externally and internally, until the film reaches a seeming crescendo of violence and rage – then suddenly thrusts us back to the beginning again, this time from the perspective of Jack. Like most Barry Keoghan characters, Jack is troubled and somewhat off-putting but fundamentally decent, shying away from crossing moral lines and ultimately acting out of a warped altruism. While him wanting to earn money to save his farm doesn’t excuse his more heinous acts, it does offer a somewhat interesting ‘both-sides’ perspective. Still, the film promises a futile, biblical bloodbath in the first half, and fails to offer a compelling reason to shy away from the nihilistic ending it so desperately needed. Bring Them Down paints itself into a corner morally and, in its clumsy efforts to avoid the logical conclusion, winds up saying nothing much at all. That doesn’t detract from the pounding intensity of the filmmaking and the performances though, leaving a film with strong in-the-moment stakes but that doesn’t leave much food for thought. 7/10.

We Live In Time

Speaking of food for thought, John Crowley’s new film We Live In Time left me absolutely famished. Sure, I smiled and nodded along with the film – I wouldn’t blame anyone for being taken in by its gentle wit and the charisma of the leads. But when the film finally ended (and it does drag on a bit), I was left with a single, overwhelming thought – “What was the point of that?” The word of the day is unchallenging, the secret to the film’s easy feel-good vibe and also the reason it winds up feeling utterly pointless – even the godawful It Ends With Us had an ill-advised moral message to leave me scratching my head for days after. We Live In Time is structured non-linearly, jumping around the timeline of Tobias (Andrew Garfield) and Almut (Florence Pugh)’s lives together. For what purpose, I couldn’t possibly tell you. Nothing is gained dramatically by cutting up this entirely straightforward story, and I’d watch a linear cut purely out of curiosity. The closest the film comes to having an idea is Almut’s assertion during her cancer diagnosis that she’d “rather have six wonderful, active months than twelve passive, shitty months”. But this film exists in a world where there is no such thing as shittyness – everyone and everything is absolutely pristine and perfect at all times. Fights are resolved without compromise, homes are spacious and tastefully decorated, their careers are lucrative and glamorous, they are always perfectly dressed and made-up. Even childbirth is a sanitary, bloodless affair, while cancer boils down to Pugh fashionably shaving her head and daintily puking into a toilet right before winning her prestigious cooking competition effortlessly offscreen. Now a film can present a perfect world in a compelling way, but only if the characters are compellingly dysfunctional – see the entire filmography of Nancy Meyers, where the casual wealth and success of the characters works as a contrast to how mentally fucked-up and socially incompetent they inevitably are. As you may have guessed, this is not the case here. These are stock rom-com protagonists who would not have an iota of character between them without this quality of performer onboard. This material is beneath them – Garfield essentially plays himself and it still feels performative, while Pugh is visibly desperate for any chance to make Almut slightly unlikable or three-dimensional. Not only do I feel I’ve wasted my time watching it, I’ve wasted my time talking about it too. Analysis of a film this twee and brainless isn’t worth the paper it would be printed on. Now to be clear, I did not hate the film, nor did I think it was horribly made or acted. I give this film a 4/10 because it wasn’t bad enough or offensive enough to deserve a lower score – a film has to properly piss me off before I dip any lower than the two star barrier. That said, don’t watch this.