An Australian thriller set in late ‘80s Perth Hounds of Love checks off all the boxes as a genre piece: sadistic serial killer, torturous captivity scenes, incompetent police, ugly period cars and furniture and just the right dose of comeuppance in the final act. It even features artful and amusing super-slow motion photography in interstitial scenes. Refreshingly, writer-director Ben Young makes only half-hearted efforts to make Hounds of Love anything more than just a good genre film. Beyond a few plot points on the broader theme of motherhood he allows the film to be what it is.
Vicki Maloney (Ashleigh Cummings) is coping with her parent’s messy divorce and stricken by a particularly nasty streak of teenage rebellion against their authority. She sneaks out of the house to party with her boyfriend and, personifying the film’s take on the aw-shucks attitude of the carefree ‘80s, accepts a ride from a couple who lives nearby. Evelyn (Emma Booth) and John White (Stephen Curry) promise to sell Vicki some good weed for her festivities, but instead, they lure her into the house, overpower her and shackle her to a bed in their spare room.
The Whites keep their marriage fresh by abducting neighborhood girls, strapping them down, repeatedly raping them and then murdering them. Hounds of Love does the requisite amount of work to make it seem plausible that a couple could serially kidnap and kill teenage girls without local society splitting apart at the seams. There is a scene at the police precinct where a cop disinterestedly ignores Vicki’s parents about her having gone missing; she is just one more girl who ran away for a better life in a more affluent part of Australia. The film’s ‘80s setting means there are no complications related to cell phones or social media. It almost seems possible that an untold number of girls could disappear without a trace without triggering a state of emergency.
Vicki is on her own. To survive, she takes advantage of Evelyn’s mental instability, a result of her two daughters being taken into protective custody. Evelyn misses her children and is wracked by guilt that she’s a bad mother, so she got a dog, which proves crucial to the plot. Vicki observes that John—who is the kids’ step-father—does not care whether they are returned or not, so she tries to turn Evelyn against John. The result is a tense, violent drama contained within the narrow confines of the Whites’ meager home. The action approaches the level of disturbing, but Young cleverly makes the most unsettling scene of violence in Hounds of Love one that will leave viewers questioning their own perspective.
In setting up Evelyn’s bitter past, the movie establishes Vicki’s mother as a contrasting maternal image. Vicki has an ambiguous relationship with her mother, but the film posits that family ties and maternal instinct can endure even the most intense strain. This narrative line is eye-rollingly banal but is secondary to the film’s action. Several minor characters are given too much screen time without any real purpose or development; perhaps they are meant to ratchet up the tension, but this is not a story whose resolution is ever really in doubt.
All of these script concerns and mild gestures towards an argument about motherhood ultimately do not matter much; this is a serial-killer-and-captivity thriller at its core—and a successful one—and the viewer can take it or leave it on those terms.
The post Hounds of Love appeared first on Spectrum Culture.