Film / Reviews
Review: Hounds of Love
Hounds of Love (18)
Australia 2016 108 mins Dir: Ben Young Cast: Emma Booth, Ashleigh Cummings, Stephen Curry
The ‘woman chained up in a basement’ torture porn sub-genre has become an increasingly tiresome dead-end for unimaginative straight-to-DVD horror. But lately a slew of art house flicks have been putting a new spin on the abduction thriller template with varying degrees of success, from the Oscar-winning Room to the more recent, less satisfactory Berlin Syndrome. Debuting director Ben Young’s Hounds of Love also belongs to another enduringly popular subset in the Venn diagram of horror: Australian flicks that helpfully remind the rest of the world that Down Under is teeming with serial killers, violent criminals and deadly fauna.
It opens creepily with a sleazy couple perving over sporty schoolgirls filmed in ultra-slo-mo in sun-drenched Perth just before Christmas, 1987. We soon learn that they are Evelyn (Booth) and John White (Curry), a Fred’n’Rose-style serial killer duo who rely on carefully cultivated bonhomie and a reassuring child’s car seat to coax girls into their vehicle. Back home, John gets down to business by inflicting unseen unspeakable horrors on the latest victim, while Evelyn busies herself making coffee and toast in the kitchen. It’s a scene that’s eerily reminiscent of Pablo Trapero’s The Clan played out in the nondescript suburbia of Animal Kingdom and Snowtown, where brutal violence is inflicted behind closed doors. Meanwhile across town, the parents of 17-year-old Vicki Maloney (Cummings) are in the midst of a painful separation. Defying her mother’s instructions, this barely-dressed, rebellious teen sneaks out to a party and swiftly falls into the Whites’ trap. Lured back to their abode on the promise of some quality pot, she’s drugged and chained to a bed. Evelyn is so excited by this achievement that she promptly rewards John with a vigorous blowjob.
Some critics, even admiring ones, have used the term ‘unwatchable’ to describe the violence in Hounds of Love. That seems rather odd, given that virtually all of this takes place offscreen. But it is perhaps a tribute to Young’s impressive skill as a filmmaker that he can make audiences believe that they’ve seen more than they have, prompting their imaginations to fill in the gaps. Based loosely on a series of real-life murders, this is as intense and suspenseful as the best genre thrillers, but also functions as a persuasive character study, with excellent performances by its three principals. One might struggle to describe the film as feminist, but Young is certainly most concerned with his two female characters.
John is a scrawny, boorish, manipulative, rage-prone psycho and bully, who is himself bullied by a pair of ne’er-do-wells to whom he owes money. Damaged, insecure and rather desperate Evelyn has glommed on to him in the hope that by indulging and participating in his murderous activities they will achieve some kind of twisted domestic bliss and regain custody of her children from a previous relationship. She also sees the couple’s invariably young and nubile abductees as a sexual threat, which is not unreasonable given John’s propensity to sneak off and rape them whenever she’s out of the house. Vicki, meanwhile, is neither a helpless victim nor a resourceful, improbable avenger, instead deploying the acuity with which she has observed her parents’ disintegrating marriage to attempt to drive a wedge between her dysfunctional captors. This proves to be a dangerous psychological game.
It’s not perfect. There are a few contrivances and cliches (who’d be a pet in a serial killer household, eh?) and thriller convention comes to the fore during the last act. Young also ensures that we’ll struggle to listen to Nights in White Satin and the pre-Islam Cat Stevens’ lovely Lady D’Arbanville in the same way again, for which you may or may not be grateful. Just be thankful he couldn’t afford the rights to the titular Kate Bush song.
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