First, a warning: For anyone who sees the title of Ben Young's feature debut and assumes it's a Kate Bush biopic, you couldn't be further from the mark. (Bush's title track from her landmark 1985 album isn't even on the soundtrack here.) Instead, Young's film uses the title more abstractly, to paint a dark, at times unbearably tense portrait of a serial-killing couple in Western Australia.
Loosely based on the real-life crimes of David and Catherine Birnie, who killed four young Perth women in the eighties, Hounds of Love is essentially a three-hander, as psychopaths John (Stephen Curry) and Evelyn (Emma Booth) take turns tormenting young Vicki (Ashleigh Cummings), who they abducted.
The central performances are riveting – Curry, an Australian comedian, is frighteningly intense – but the torture Young depicts, even only if it's suggestive rather than blatant, can be difficult to digest over the course of almost two long hours.
Barry Hertz