Hounds of Love

• Director Ben Young insists the script is fiction, but the bones are Perth's own: the suburban-couple-abducts-young-women premise, the 1980s setting, and the final-victim-who-escapes ending all track hard against the 1986 Moorhouse Murders committed by David and Catherine Birnie. The Birnies killed four women over about five weeks before their fifth intended victim, 17-year-old Kate Moir, got away and led police to them. Young has said he drew on nine different killer couples and deliberately avoided naming any real case.
• It was Young's feature debut, and he came up through music videos and short films, which shows in the picture's patient slow-motion suburbia and curated needle-drops.
• Stephen Curry, beloved in Australia as goofy Dale Kerrigan from the 1997 comedy The Castle, plays killer John White entirely against type. Wikipedia still files him under 'Stephen Curry (comedian).' Curry told Time Out that after shooting all he wanted to do was go home and hug his kids.
• Despite the title, you never hear Kate Bush's 'Hounds of Love' in the film. The soundtrack leans on period cuts instead, all predating the action: Joy Division's 'Atmosphere' (used over the finale), Cat Stevens' 'Lady D'Arbanville,' and the Moody Blues' 'Nights in White Satin.' The original score is by Dan Luscombe of the Drones.
• Hounds of Love premiered at the 73rd Venice International Film Festival on 1 September 2016 in the Venice Days sidebar, where Ashleigh Cummings took the Fedeora Award for Best Actress.
• It was shot in and around Perth with Western Australian backing through Screenwest, lensed by cinematographer Michael McDermott. It runs 108 minutes and sits at 88% on Rotten Tomatoes.

The real prey isn't Vicki, it's Evelyn. Watch how Vicki stops fighting the chains and starts pulling at the marriage instead, feeding Evelyn's jealousy over John, dangling the children Evelyn lost. The kidnapping plot is a Trojan horse for a study of an abused woman waking up, and Vicki's survival hinges on radicalizing her captor faster than John can re-control her.

John kills to keep Evelyn dependent, not for the girls. Every murder rebinds her to him by making her complicit and unable to leave. The violence is the glue of a codependent couple, which is why the film lingers on the domestic rot, the dog, the dinner table, the petty money fights, more than on the abductions themselves.

The opening slow-motion of schoolgirls in gym uniforms, shot from a predator's cruising car, indicts the gaze itself. Young makes the camera complicit before a single crime happens, so the rest of the film keeps asking whether the viewer came to watch suffering or to watch someone refuse it.

Perth, mid-eighties. Schoolgirl Vicki Maloney accepts a lift from a couple who seem ordinary right up until the bedroom door locks behind her. John and Evelyn White don't hunt as monsters; they hunt as a marriage, and the chains in the spare room are downstream of every grudge, jealousy, and dependency rotting between them. Vicki figures out fast that her only exit isn't the window, it's the fault line running through her captors. She starts working the wife. Survival here means reading a sick relationship better than the two people trapped inside it.