"Once you start a war, what does it take to finish a war?" writer and director Christopher Andrews ponders, recalling this question as forming the genesis to his feature directorial debut, Bring Them Down.
Speaking with Exclaim! during a video interview, Andrews observes, "People will use pretty much anything as an excuse to start wars, and generally, they're because of something else — greed, money, land. Kicking dust over the real reason."
His film, in theatres across Canada this Friday (February 7) and streaming on MUBI in the future (get a free 30-day trial here), follows two families in a farming community in west Ireland who coexist amid fraught and deeply rooted tension, as the discovery of dead sheep leads to an escalating war between families, as vengeful violence reaches a sociopathic boiling point between rivals Michael (Christopher Abbott) and Jack (Barry Keoghan).
Bring Them Down, which had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, represents masculinity at its worst: two stubborn egos unwilling to back down, with little mind paid to consequences apart from coming out on top as the alpha. Andrews considers this narrative within the context of the Good Shepherd, a Christian parable that points to Jesus being the leader and saviour of his flock.
The British director, though, upends and darkens the story allowing "there to be complexity to the characters by placing them in this parable and then twisting it — pulling the rope from underneath it."
He continues, "I was very interested in this landscape and these kinds of characters. Exploring this idea of what it means to be a shepherd. What it means to be somebody who has a responsibility for a flock and a responsibility for the land, a kind of a connection that you're not able to leave."
Where Bring Them Down becomes a fascinating filmic journey through a story passed down over thousands of years is how Andrews takes a step back and modernizes our view of the parable, considering what place a story like the Good Shepherd has in our modern secular society.
By moving away from religion, Andrews asks, "What are we gaining, and what are we losing?" Speaking specifically of the Western society he grew up in, Andrews muses over the political and cultural evolution that has taken place in recent human history, one that detaches itself from a few thousand years of culture centred around Christianity.
"We're losing a sense of morality that maybe some people thought a long time ago we needed," he says, acknowledging religion's role in the past as providing needed structure and a moral compass.
"Because of the animals that we are, we protect what is closest to us. We start with ourselves, and then with our families, then our immediate community, town, county, country. I feel like the further we get away from this idea of religion, we're losing things that might have been important to us. It might be the right thing to evolve culturally, but it may be that we need to find a way of weaving those things back in."
Michael and Jack engage in acts of cruelty in response to one another, answering Andrews's question as to how to end a war: by becoming increasingly volatile until it's too late. He also offers an extreme example of what happens when people lose all sense of morality, whether guided by religion or not — although, to be clear, the film itself doesn't contain religious rhetoric outside the obvious shepherd and his flock comparisons.
Andrews wrote the film, and therefore Michael and Jack's aggression are his creation, but the filmmaker insists that he and his film provide no answers to the world's problems or his own wonderments.
"These are things that I think about, but I don't have any answers," Andrews says, describing his daily practice of writing thoughts and questions he has about the world in a notebook, tracking how his opinions change over time.
"Every day that I get older, I believe that I know less. [The movie's] more questions than answers."