Wolf Man star Christopher Abbott swaps monsters for personal demons in new thriller Bring Them Down. He stars alongside Barry Keoghan in the sheep farming yarn, who he says is "as alive when you're working with him on set as he is on screen" when GamesRadar+ sits down with him over Zoom.
Abbott plays Michael, a sheep farmer who leads a lonely life in rural Ireland with only his ailing, ageing father and the burden of responsibility for a tragic accident that happened two decades prior for company. His quiet life is suddenly disrupted, however, by a minor dispute over land access with neighboring farmer Gary (Paul Ready) and his son Jack (Keoghan) that quickly snowballs out of everyone's control.
The film is the debut feature from writer-director Christopher Andrews, who Abbott praises for "taking this, on paper, very small world and small story, but adding these bigger allegories and terrible themes to it."
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"To me, the movie is almost biblical," he continues. "It's like the Parable for the Good Shepherd, and I personally feel that it's strangely almost like a mafia movie. With sheep." The title of the movie refers to the "bringing down" of livestock from higher ground to lower pastures, but also plays into the reactive nature of the two farmers' feud.
The sheep in the film provide plenty of opportunity for metaphor, and Abbot expands on the New Testament comparisons: he thinks "the idea of the shepherd leaving one away from his flock, going to get the one sheep that he left behind, but then leaving the rest" can also be applied to the family dynamics in the film. "There's a lot to play with there."
As for the mafia parallels, there may not be any organized crime in Bring Them Down, but there's plenty of violence in the film against both man and beast that's presented in a frighteningly casual and matter-of-fact way. Combined with an oppressive, seemingly inevitable expectation of masculinity that weighs heavily on both Michael and Jack from the patriarchal figures in their lives, the comparison isn't actually that left field.
It's not just the movie's themes but its form, too, as Abbott thinks the film's structure – which abruptly and unexpectedly switches its narrative POV from Michael to Jack halfway through the runtime – is also reminiscent of a mob flick. "You're following this one character and you learn just enough about what's going on to have a fair amount of questions, and then it switches," he explains. "And then some of those [questions] get answered, until this sort of final crescendo. I really liked it. I thought it was exciting."
There's no clear hero or villain in the movie and no apparent winner or loser as the altercation between Michael and Jack plays out, and the futility of the situation plays into the tragedy of the film. "It's not an obvious thing why the characters are pitted against each other. It just sort of happens," Abbott explains. "I love in movies where a small event changes the course of a character's life, and the reason why Michael is pitted against Barry's character is sort of silly.
"It's really just a series of misunderstandings and mistakes [then] all of a sudden this mayhem starts happening. If they'd just gotten together and chatted for an hour about everything, probably a lot of things could get resolved, but it doesn't. But that's the drama of it. They're enemies, but neither of the characters even knows why, and that's what's interesting."
Bring Them Down is out now in UK cinemas and US theaters. For more on what to watch, check out the rest of our Big Screen Spotlight series.
