Young’s facility with these scenes – as well as with the desperate search underway – launches his movie into the company of ‘The Silence of the Lambs’. When the chains come out, ‘Hounds of Love’ becomes a sweat-drenched exercise in psychological warfare, as Vicki tries to pit Evelyn’s apparent neediness against John’s brutish mood swings. We know what’s coming long before they lure Vicki to their den to get high. Loosely inspired by real- life murderers David and Catherine Birnie, it is set in Perth, Australia, and the plot centres around a couple of serial killers who go after teenage girls, kidnapping and torturing them.
Movie hounds of love how to#
But it’s the film’s central pair of monsters, Evelyn and John White (Emma Booth and Stephen Curry, both extraordinary), who capture our dark imaginations. I n his directorial debut, writer-director Ben Young proves with Hounds of Love that he knows how to create an impressive horror movie. As she observes the dynamic between her captors she quickly realises she must drive a wedge between them if she is to. Our heroine is frizzy-haired Vicki (Ashleigh Cummings), who has a habit of sneaking out of home after dark to buy pot from strangers. In the mid 1980’s, seventeen-year-old Vicki Maloney is randomly abducted from a suburban street by a disturbed couple. Director Ben Young’s universe is a carefully recreated 1986, during which the so-called ‘Moorhouse murders’ – perpetrated by a married couple – transpired. ‘Hounds of Love’ takes as partial inspiration two real-life killing sprees that still haunt the western city of Perth. Elsewhere, bad sex is happening in trashy brick-walled apartments while the sun-bleached neighbourhood outside seems to invite a catastrophe. It opens with an ominous montage of slo-mo camerawork ogling the bodies of high school cheerleaders, crosscut with the moist lips and eyes of a couple spying from a parked car. What is it about Australian filmmakers and down-and-dirty, no-holds-barred crime dramas? This is a fearsomely accomplished first feature: a kidnapping thriller that never gets too far from the action (even though you’ll want to be). Dark forces lurk behind the sunny faade of an unassuming Australian suburb in Ben Youngs stylish 80s-set directorial debut.