“Drop Them” is a brutally violent directorial debut, oscillating between black humor and heartbreak. A story of fathers, sons, and deformed sheep, the film plays with a Rashomon-style narrative perspective, but it keeps nagging at questions of masculinity and the cycles of grief that hover just outside the field of view. As with its emotionally vulnerable male characters, the film never confronts these concepts head-on, allowing them to build quietly into a bloody, simmering vendetta that feels all-encompassing in the moment but, when you step back, reveals a pathetic quality.
A short but haunting prologue—told through alternating chaos and silence—reveals a car accident. When Michael (Christopher Abbott) discovers that his mother is planning to leave his father, he speeds off the road in a fit of uncontrollable emotion. His mother, who was in the passenger seat, is killed on impact. His then-girlfriend Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone) was also in the car, leaving a visible scar along the left side of her face, a vivid illustration of the way women bear the brunt of men’s unchecked rage.
Years later, Michael lives with his paralyzed father, Ray (Colm Meaney), who tends his sheep farm day and night. Caroline has also married Michael's neighbour and rival, Gary (Paul Reddy), with whom she has a teenage son, Jack (Barry Keoghan). The weight of past traumas already leaves tension between the two families, which is only exacerbated when two of Michael's sheep are found dead on Gary's property. Before long, things escalate and cause further suspicion, when more of Michael's livestock are badly mutilated, leaving him to kill them one by one.
By revealing this silent storm from Michael’s perspective, Bring Them Down creates a disorienting aura around Gary and Jack—accompanied by a powerful, unbalanced soundtrack—as they act kindly toward Michael one moment, while approaching him with icy coldness the next. Complicating matters further is the fact that Caroline still approaches Michael with a gentle demeanor, a warmth she no longer feels toward her husband. Yet Michael can’t help but be reminded of his actions every time he looks at her face.
Exactly who is responsible for each new violent turn (and, more importantly, why) gradually but deliberately comes to light. For much of the film’s first half, Andrews sends Michael on a journey through the nighttime landscape—which obscures the violent images before revealing them at specific, poignant moments—in order to round up his herd, or exact revenge on the seemingly sociopathic father-son duo. However, as the film rewinds and reveals new layers of its ostensible antagonist, Michael begins to seem unbalanced, plunging the three men (four, if you count Ray) into a deeply frustrating and occasionally hilarious story where bloodshed is inevitable.
Although none of the characters express any religious or superstitious beliefs—and, for one, they don’t express much of any in words at first—the premise of “Drop Them” feels damning. Michael’s sheep are innocent victims of something larger, to be sure, but the impending sense that he may have earned this punishment for his past sins (or at least he thinks he has) is inevitable, lending the film a purgatorial quality. Meanwhile, the pressures exerted by his father, and by Gary Jacks, put Abbott and Coogan’s characters on a collision course, eliciting from each a quiet, uneasy performance that occasionally escalates into bouts of disturbing emotion. Both actors are excellent, able to play vastly different modes within the same narrow framework, depending on the perspective that the film reveals.
Andrews carves a distinct space for allusion into a story that should seem literal and straightforward, making the audience wonder (as the characters might, even unconsciously) about truths that have not been confronted. For example, Ray is unaware of Michael’s role in his wife’s death, even though he often laments her passing aloud to him, as if to somehow defy him. Similarly, Caroline’s crumbling marriage and her remaining kinship to Michael can’t help but make one wonder who Jack’s son really is. This question is never explicitly asked, but it takes on greater thematic significance in the context of the father and son’s reflections in the film. Jack and Michael both become victims of their familial circumstances and their own selfishness, as if they are central to this story of violence and hatred.
When things finally do come to blows between them, Bring Them Down regresses from its over-the-top revenge-movie visual style, robbing the simmering conflict between the families of any notable appeal. The film’s core is its lack of stylization at its most violent moments. This leaves its villains feeling pathetic by the end, as if the roles they’ve been thrust into by forces greater than themselves—their parents, their lineage, their financial circumstances—have reduced them to squabbling children. It’s very funny, and it’s very sad.
