The first feature from writer-director Christopher Andrews, about a violent turf war between two families of sheep herders, premiered in Toronto.
, debuting writer-director Christopher Andrews’ pitch-dark drama about two Irish farmers engaged in a long and bloody turf war. Relentlessly bleak, with more livestock gore than any movie in recent memory — the film that comes the closest is fellow Irish director Billy O’Brien’s 2005 bovine thriller,The two compelling actors play herders struggling to get by in the muddy hills of west Ireland, where a longtime feud between their families degenerates into an all-out dogfight .
This is not a pleasant household — nor is the one just down the road, where Michael’s sister, Caroline , is now married to a bitter and drunken shepherd named Gary . Their son, Jack , is younger than Michael, and although the two are related they’re hardly friends. When an argument breaks out over a pair of sheep Michael claims were stolen from his herd, it quickly escalates into a conflict that gets wildly out of hand.
The latter seems to be the major force ruling over a godforsaken corner of Ireland where, in one of the film’s gorier sequences, dozens upon dozens of sheep are illicitly slaughtered so their hind legs can be sold for cheap meat. There’s something downright biblical about the way Andrews and cinematographer Nick Cooke capture the massacre and other difficult scenes, staging them against a backdrop of rolling hills that stretch to infinity, with the sun dipping in and out of the clouds.
But the director winds up taking his dark premise too far, losing credibility as his characters keep doing extremely dumb and destructive things. Beyond Caroline, who plans to skip town to Cork and perhaps take Jack with her, the others are condemned to a miserable existence that apparently hasn’t changed for centuries.
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