Hounds of Love is an Australian thriller from writer/director Ben Young, who has previous experience in short films and TV. I was excited to get a chance to review this one given some early positive buzz and the film wastes no time in making its caliber known. From the very first scene of a car slowly surveying a group of teenage girls playing volleyball it’s a combination of visual splendor and impending dread as the viewer is seduced into this world where torture and murder are how one couple keeps their passion alive.

Adhering rather faithfully to what are known as the Moorhouse Murders, a string of slayings committed by couple David and Catherine Birnie in 1980s Perth, Hounds of Love begins with a quasi non-linear narrative, jumping between the troubled home life of Vicki Maloney (Ashleigh Cummings) and her mother, Maggie (Susie Porter), and her kidnapping and subsequent imprisonment by John (Stephen Curry) and Evelyn White (Emma Booth) before the two plots threads intersect. Vicki is in many ways a typical rebellious teen with her life made more stressful because her parents are divorced and she is split between them, a fact she blames on her mother. It’s during one of these moments of rebellion where she finds herself in the cross-hairs of John and Evelyn, who use their appearance as a happy family to hide their sinister intent. What follows is a nail-biting, claustrophobic exploration of a staggeringly toxic yet very human relationship and a girl’s struggle to make it out of this madhouse alive.

Given that this is Young’s first full-length feature, he doesn’t seem at all out of his element, crafting an exceptionally tight, exceptionally dark character drama that remains grimly captivating as layers of depravity and co-dependence paint an evolving portrait of the villains that are running the show. That’s not to say that Cummings doesn’t deliver in her role as well, capturing the depths of Vicki’s suffering as well as her strong will to survive, but after things start to go downhill for her, she becomes more of a plot element than a fleshed-out character, a pawn in her captor’s twisted game, used both for their gratification and as a tool in their uneasy power struggle. John is a big fish in a little pond, a calculating and dominant force over his wife, but powerless and ostracized from the larger community, often finding himself the object of threats and humiliation by a local drug dealer to whom he’s indebted. It’s a very human performance, striving to control the world around him but not being particularly successful at it, his fallibility increases the tension of the experience by creating the impression he’s at most one step ahead of his captive at any given point. The star performance of this film, however, has to go to Emily Booth. Evelyn is a highly disturbed and complex character, subjugated and at times sympathetic, but no less brutal than her husband when she feels that the life she is built is being threatened. Porter’s role as Vicki’s grief-stricken mother isn’t given as much screen time relative to the main players until later in the film, but she deserves to be noted as well for her portrayal which does a lot to humanize Vicki’s character by adding the dramatic weight to the misery created by her disappearance. The acting as a whole is subtle and even static when they aren’t in the torturing mood but the emptiness is filled by an oppressive tension created by the actor’s tone and body language.

None of this would have had the same impact had it not been for the consistently top-notch production. The visuals are meticulously crafted and some of the best I can recall seeing since It Follows. Given that it takes place in the 80s, this film has a similar color grading to that film, creating an authentic appearance with a rich color palette along with crisp detail and dramatic depth of field. The blocking and composition compliment the claustrophobic style beautifully, slowly creeping across the screen and only revealing those details necessary for optimal uneasiness. It’s a dark and brutal film, but that’s mostly down to the implications. Very little violence or gore is shown on-screen, but plenty of context is given both visually and in the narrative to allow you to piece together what is going on and it’s rarely good. Most of the makeup work is devoted to showing the scars of Vicki’s abuse on her face, which grows increasingly bloated and distressed throughout the course of the film. The score also feels reminiscent of It Follows with its Carpenteresque bright haunting synths, but here they’re contrasted by a strange selection of somber 80s ballads employed to great effect to sort of normalize the whole affair, which ends up making it all that more uncomfortable.

Hounds of Love is one of those films it’s hard to imagine picking up unless you’re looking to spend the next 2 hours being miserable, but as misery goes it’s a hell of a ride.