Another Belated 31 Nights of Horror: Night Twelve, "Hounds of Love"

In the tradition of other notable Australian horror like The Snowtown Murders and Wolf Creek, Hounds of Love has roots in true crime. It’s more of a composite than those movies, drawing from at least two or three chapters in Australian crime history to assemble this nasty little picture, but that doesn’t diminish its impact in the slightest. Hounds of Love isn’t stingy with the grimy details as it moves with documentarian deliberateness on the trail of John and Evelyn White (Stephen Curry and Emma Booth), a Bonnie-and-Clyde couple who prowl the suburbs in search of girls to abduct. The movie’s “twist” is that their abductee, Vicki Maloney (Ashleigh Cummings), is much more intelligent than they anticipate.

    But this isn’t You’re Next. Don’t expect a superhumanly competent protagonist, and be prepared to wince and yell at the screen. Don’t anticipate a single protagonist, either; for as much as we identify with Vicki in this unfathomably awful situation, we peek into the psyches and personal lives of her abductors with the same depth and uncommon sensitivity as we do Vicki. John and Evelyn are perfect team as far as serial killers pairings go--she has the wits and the charm, and he the amoral single-mindedness, to see their crimes through--but their marriage is a different story, one predicated on emotional manipulation and withheld affection Evelyn doesn’t seem to recognize until Vicki, the child of a troubled family herself, opens her eyes.

What Hounds of Love lacks in a center, it more than compensates in the psychological chess match that develops between Vicki and Evelyn as Vicki explores the cracks in the couple’s unstable relationship to her advantage. It’s the movie’s most engrossing aspect as Hounds of Love takes the time to show us just how terrible love can be through the lens of a real-world incident. It’s not so much about what people do for love, but what love does to people.

-Brian L.

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