Hounds of Love review: riveting Aussie serial killer thriller will give you a pulverising emotional workout
Dir: Ben Young. Cast: Emma Booth, Ashleigh Cummings, Stephen Curry, Susie Porter. 18 cert, 106 mins
Hounds of Love is this week’s instant candidate for “one to avoid on a first date”, “skip the popcorn, maybe” and “an experience that might literally kill your grandma”, rolled into one. Not since Wolf Creek – or perhaps 2011’s mesmerisingly horrible Snowtown – has Australia felt like a less tempting tourist destination than in this tale of husband-and-wife serial killers abducting schoolgirls to get their kicks.
It’s a minor relief that the film is set in the distant milieu of 1987 suburban Perth, and another one that though it feels based on a true story – as Snowtown or Animal Kingdom were – it’s actually inspired by several. The writer-director Ben Young, announcing himself as a name to watch, has done his homework by researching a slew of cases and considering the psychology of his story very astutely.
He also grew up in Perth, and the film’s gliding, anthropological vision of a middle-class neighbourhood, all neatly kempt lawns and pervasive unhappiness, feels totally specific and credible, right down to the facial hair.
A slow-motion netball game sets things off, when one teenager fatefully accepts a lift home from Evelyn White (Emma Booth) and her husband John (Stephen Curry). We never see her again. We see the aftermath, the hideous accoutrements they’ve used on her, and the forest grave into which they dump her body a few days later.
From this point, we dread the Whites prowling the streets in their tan Holden station wagon, and the dread becomes focused tightly on Vicki (Ashleigh Cummings), a rebellious 16-year-old whose parents are embroiled in a testy divorce. When she sneaks out one night on her exasperated mother (Susie Porter, handling a small role perfectly), Young lures her with excruciating tension into the couple’s clutches.
Characterisation is the film’s trump card, and the ghastly home life of the Whites is analysed in impressively clear and forensic detail. Telling us just as much as the plywood over the windows or chains attached to their spare bedposts is the egg-and-soldiers plate which Evelyn unfailingly provides her husband each morning. When Vicki makes one of her bids to escape, and the egg gets forgotten, it sits there congealing for several reels until John barks to have it cleaned up.
To the outside world, he seems a weakling, ducking the gaze of alpha males; Curry – best-known as a comedian – invests him with a pathetic uncertainty and spinelessness. Inside, he’s the king of his domain, a tyrant of perversion whose unstable wife kowtows out of stark emotional need.
She has even agreed to leave her children from an earlier relationship behind, accepting a dog as a consolation prize. Vicki, more perceptive and determined to live than most, intuits this power dynamic and makes probing it into her main survival strategy. If Evelyn can be woken up to her own victimisation, there’s hope.
Young makes a couple of first-timer missteps – there’s a tricksy moment too openly borrowed from The Silence of the Lambs, and a Joy Division track that’s so on-the-nose he should have thought twice before staking his whole finale on it.
He has riveting collaborators in his actresses, though. Cummings, a price-winner at Venice last year, is startlingly believable at burrowing into Vicky’s distress and terror – her wide-mouthed screams are the sound design’s spine-chilling coups de grâce at every turn – but also thinking quickly through each phase of her ordeal.
And Booth is simply outstanding, weighing up with deep shading the oppressive circumstances that have made Evelyn both torturer and captive, nemesis and potential lifeline. Inching towards something like empathy, the pair of them elevate Young’s film into a pulverising emotional workout – so much more than the coldly procedural, torture-porny exercise it could have been.
