 | MOVIE DETAILS • Name: Hounds of Love • Year: 2016 • Country: Australia • Director: Ben Young • Main cast: Emma Booth, Ashleigh Cummings, Stephen Curry • Runtime: 108 minutes • Production company: Factor 30 Films • TRAILER
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Ben Young’s debut film Hounds of Love has been one of the good surprises of this year’s Sitges Film Festival. He has brought us a kidnapping movie from Australia, set in the 80s, where a couple abducts teen girls from the street to do unmentionable things to them. In the quietness of the residential suburban area, a girl must fight wisely if she wants to gain back her freedom.
Adolescence is a hard time of life, we all know that, so when the two disturbed raptors go for teens they play with some advantage. Director Young pictures us the story from both points of view: we follow Vicki (Ashleigh Cummings) on her fatal decisions, as well as we have the chance to look deeper into the relationship between Evelyn and John White (Emma Booth and Stephen Curry), a troubled mixture of sexual desire and frustration, ultimately driven by force. With a great command of images and music, he exquisitely uses slow motions and knows very well when it’s best not to show things, but let imagination think up the worst instead. Taking care of the details, he masterly builds up tension and claustrophobia among the sunny days and the papered walls.
Greatly performed and edited, the realism of the psychopath’s connection brings you awfully close to them, more with looks and insinuations than with words. This way of showing and hiding makes the viewing of the movie scary in a different way, more from the inside, from your bones, like a submersible experience in their troubled minds. A reflection about controlling the weaker that won’t leave you indifferent. A totally recommendable experience to watch.
RATE: 7/10
IMDB URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3896738
