What follows is a series of escalating tortures that lack suspense, scares or the intense interpersonal drama hinted at by Hounds of Love’s teasingly imbalanced relationship. She lasts about as long as you might think before being abducted. She sneaks out of the house (in another noticeably pretty shot capturing both her escape and her mom’s trusting normalcy) and into the suburban night where the secretive goings-on may be teen parties or sex murderers. Vicki’s parents are mid-divorce, she’s dating an older boy (who exists solely to set up an incredibly lame, impossibly obvious plot device later in the film…let’s call it Chekhov’s cipher), and she wants to party away her emotions. The two need another victim after they dispose of the first and Vicki Maloney (Ashleigh Cummings, mostly just asked to scream) is the first and best teen to make poor decisions in their vicinity. He’s the cruel one-she’s just along for the ride.īut there’s no mistaking that, regardless, they’re in it together. Their relationship-resembling those of upsetting character studies like Badlands or even Sightseers-is the fascinating core of an otherwise banal torture flick, mostly due to Booth’s incredible performance, her stressed, murderous loyalty so clearly deriving from fear, self-doubt and jealousy just by watching her body language and how she responds physically to Curry’s character when they’re together. Nobody seems to be on the case of disturbed couple John (Stephen Curry) and Evelyn White (Emma Booth). Cinematographer Michael McDermott is key in crafting the film’s off-putting perspective shots and dirty “gruburb” setting, telling us, before anything else happens, that something is amiss in ’80s suburban Perth.Ī first victim is kidnapped, raped, killed and buried with such gleeful swiftness that we believe many more are to come. The lingering gaze of a lip-smacking predator is caught out of a car window. A visual trick the film employs to dupe us into their mindset is a fast tracking shot driving by while everything else is in slow motion.

This is how we’re introduced to the central couple in Hounds of Love: Leering, plotting. It’s the slow-motion perspective of a pervert driving by-the shadow of a girl’s hand passing over her body acting as a spectral extension of the gross dude’s desires. Just hems, sweaty crevasses and fetishized joints.

Hounds of love nudity