“The silence is loud in a different way”: How Hannah Peel and Christopher Andrews found the spectral sound of Bring Them Down

The MUBI film’s award-winning creator Christopher Andrews and composer Hannah Peel on tying sonic textures to physical environment, and finding inspiration in Steve Reich’s Drumming.

Christopher Andrews is the writer and director of Bring Them Down, a terse, brooding revenge thriller starring Barry Keoghan and Christopher Abbott. The film tells the story of two warring farming families in rural west Ireland as their grievances spill over into violent recriminations. It’s a contemporary reimagining of the parable of the good shepherd, examining the trauma and tension that can fester beneath the surface of rural communities. 

In its coldest, most biting moments, the film draws on unspeakable acts of cruelty to both humans and sheep. With animal welfare a major priority on set, that meant Andrews needed to suck it up and do some DIY sound design. “The sound of the sheep in the massacres: a lot of them are me,” he says dryly, before cracking into a smile. We’re chatting on Zoom along with synth artist and composer Hannah Peel, who helmed the film’s distinctively spacious score. “I lay frustrated on a sofa in Belgium and made sheep noises.”

You wouldn’t know it. The use of audio in the film is subtle and exact. Andrews’ relationship with music is impacted by an illness he had that affected his brain, and a loss of hearing in one ear. Fondly, he describes himself slightly infuriating the mixer he worked with on the film by zeroing in on the differences between sounds, and picking up on tiny details in the mix. “I don’t like things that overpower,” he says.

Originally, there wasn’t going to be a score at all. He was going for that “filmmakery thing” of thinking “[we] won’t use score, we’ll use the landscape and the sounds of the wind and the rain; the kagools and the plastic.” Then he became interested in Drumming, a 1971 percussion piece by the minimalist doyen Steve Reich, which he brought into the edit to experiment with alongside the film’s editor George Cragg. Off the back of that, he spoke to music supervisor Phil Canning, who suggested he speak to Hannah Peel.

“You had me hooked when you said you didn’t want music initially. I was like, ‘Ah, OK, here’s the challenge,” Peel says. She was compelled by using Drumming as a stimulus: a piece that’s ostensibly non-melodic, but actually full of melody and pattern.

Andrews wanted the score to feel intrinsic to the rest of the production. “We’re not putting it on [top], but it’s coming out of the image and the themes and the materials. It feels like it’s part of it,” he says. “And that’s what Hannah did. She really got it immediately.”

The story takes place in an indeterminate town on Ireland’s west coast, one which feels at once like a specific, inescapable place and a parabolic setting untethered to time and space altogether. Scenes shift from stifling domestic settings to mesmerising natural landscapes as isolated characters move through the gorgeous depths of the Irish countryside; its mountain tops, its forests. At least in part, it’s a story about how financial difficulties can threaten to make even the most open, beautiful landscape claustrophobic, told through characters who struggle to communicate with one another and whose need to keep moving, constantly, rarely lets up.

“The landscape does speak for itself,” Peel says. “So it didn’t feel right that I would [say] ‘Let’s put some strings over this’. But I still felt that it needed some textures, so a lot of our conversations together were about the textures of the film, from the air to the metal of the gate, and then the textures of clothes.” Barry Keoghan’s Jack wears synthetic fibres, which are teased out in the more electronic aspects of the score’s sonic palette, along with the diegetic music he listens to on his headphones or in vehicles. Christopher Abbott’s Michael wears natural tweed and cottons, matched with “really natural, organic elements” like skin drums and wooden instruments; “things you can feel.”

Peel had recently met virtuosic percussionist Beibei Wang, who came on board. Singing bowls were “so softly played and so integrated into the sounds that you just kind of think, ‘Oh, maybe it’s something I’m hearing on the wind.’” During a car chase, drums “sound like they’re almost part of the engine of the Defender”, as Andrews puts it. The score builds to a fever pitch during a climactic sequence on top of a mountain. “It’s so simple but so incredibly powerful because around it is the space. The silence is loud in a different way,” Andrews says.

Which brings us back to sheep. It wasn’t only Andrews who had to work around the fact the ones on set barely made a sound.

Peel and her partner were out walking one day in the Yorkshire Dales. It was about 5pm, and a field of hungry sheep saw them, and almost decided to start chasing them. “The sound was so overpowering,” she says. “There must have been about forty sheep just bleeping away…”. She managed to capture the sounds on her iPhone and ended up layering them into the score during one of its darkest moments; a scene the pair refer to as “the massacre”.

She tells the story with warmth, but the seriousness of this subject matter is never far away. Bring Them Down is submerged in themes of heartache, loneliness, toxic masculinity, economic insecurity, and the way they can coagulate into anger and violence.

“It felt more at that point that I was scoring a horror,” she says of the scene. 

“Yeah, and it is,” Andrews says softly. “It was definitely that.”