They grab her, drag her into a room with boarded-up windows, and chain her to the bed, all to the lush orchestration of the Procol Harum tune Knights in White Satin.
They offer a lift to Vicki (Ashleigh Cummings), a teenager who has sneaked out of her house to go to a forbidden party. John (Stephen Curry), a skinny intense kind of monster, and his wife Evelyn (Emma Booth) are driving around, looking for young woman to abduct and kill.
Hounds of love review movie#
The movie is set in Perth in December 1987 (it echoes a true-life case of the time). A man will enter a room and close the door, and in the next scene, a woman is lying in bed with a bleeding mouth. Like the 2015 film Room, it’s mostly through hints - but also, it should be noted, terrifying screams that wrench your heart - that we see what’s going on. We’ll pause here to allow the less committed cinephiles time to leave the room, although it helps to know that most of what we see in Hounds of Love is similarly elusive.
It’s commonplace and common the killers take their shoes off at the door so they won’t dirty the carpets.Ī blur of scenes follows: a slow walk into a room, bloody towels on the floor, a dildo, a woman washing sheets and hanging them on a line, a man walking into the woods and digging a grave. An animated version of A Christmas Carol is on TV. Then we come to a boarded-up house near the airport - planes overhead are one of the tropes of Hounds of Love, signifying escape, perhaps, or just bad neighborhoods - with locks on the inside doors and windows. The camera caresses their legs and breasts. The first is a super slow-motion pan of a group of girls skipping in a playground. It begins with several frightening scenes. On the other hand, it is also a very accomplished movie that raises deep and haunting issues about family, manipulation and guilt. Any discussion of the Australian movie Hounds of Love should start with this caveat: this is a horrifying and disturbing film about the abduction, torture, rape and murder of schoolgirls.