You’ll by no means fairly take a look at shepherding the identical approach after watching Carry Them Down, debuting writer-director Christopher Andrews’ pitch-dark drama about two Irish farmers engaged in a protracted and bloody turf struggle. Relentlessly bleak, with extra livestock gore than any film in current reminiscence — the movie that comes the closest is fellow Irish director Billy O’Brien’s 2005 bovine thriller, Isolation — this violent first characteristic is carried extra by leads Christopher Abbott and Barry Keoghan than by its dour storytelling.

The 2 compelling actors play herders struggling to get by within the muddy hills of west Eire, the place a longtime feud between their households degenerates into an all-out dogfight (or is {that a} sheep-fight?). The battle kind of kicks off as quickly because the film begins, and one drawback with Carry Them Down is how we’re instantly plunged right into a battle whose key gamers we all know little about. The movie not solely hits the bottom operating, but in addition driving, crashing, dragging and stabbing its approach from scene to scene.

A quick prologue does reveal a serious trauma that occurred years earlier by the hands of Michael (Abbott), who will get right into a automotive accident along with his sister and mother after the latter claims she needs to divorce Michael’s dad, Ray (Colm Meaney). Once we quickly meet Ray a couple of scenes later, we are able to perceive why: Domineering and altogether disagreeable, he spends his days caught on a chair within the kitchen as a result of his dangerous knees, berating poor Michael each time the latter walks by way of the door.

This isn’t a nice family — neither is the one simply down the street, the place Michael’s sister, Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone), is now married to a bitter and drunken shepherd named Gary (Paul Prepared). Their son, Jack (Keoghan), is youthful than Michael, and though the 2 are associated they’re hardly mates. When an argument breaks out over a pair of sheep Michael claims had been stolen from his herd, it shortly escalates right into a battle that will get wildly out of hand. Pocketknives, weapons, a number of mutilations, one decapitation and one more automotive crash are all tossed into the combo, with no possible finish in sight.

Carry Them Down is so grim that it may be one thing of a chore to sit down by way of. However there’s sufficient rigidity and underlying adrenaline to maintain one hooked for not less than an hour. Andrews does an amazing job directing his two stars, who each convey some humanity to characters caught in a nasty cycle of violence and vengeance. Abbott immerses himself in a job that requires him to talk fluent Gaelic (completely credible to those untrained ears) to not point out get himself caked in layers of dust and blood. Keoghan, who’s all the time an interesting performer to observe, turns Jack right into a fragile younger man whose ethical conscience has been worn down by so a few years of poverty, isolation and poisonous masculinity.

The latter appears to be the key pressure ruling over a godforsaken nook of Eire the place, in one of many movie’s gorier sequences, dozens upon dozens of sheep are illicitly slaughtered so their hind legs will be offered for affordable meat. There’s one thing downright biblical about the way in which Andrews and cinematographer Nick Cooke (Sky Peals) seize the bloodbath and different troublesome scenes, staging them towards a backdrop of rolling hills that stretch to infinity, with the solar dipping out and in of the clouds.

However the director winds up taking his darkish premise too far, shedding credibility as his characters maintain doing extraordinarily dumb and damaging issues. Past Caroline, who plans to skip city to Cork and maybe take Jack along with her, the others are condemned to a depressing existence that apparently hasn’t modified for hundreds of years. (In line with Ray, his household’s sheep have been grazing the hills for 500 years.) These persons are actually and figuratively caught within the mud, and the unhappy conclusion of Carry Them Down appears to be that the one approach out is both to get killed or by some means handle to outlive.