And the award for best use of slo-mo goes to … Ben Young, a 35-year-old writer/director from Western Australia who, until recently, was a complete nobody.
His Eighties-set chiller is about a Perth couple, John (Stephen Curry) and Evelyn (Emma Booth). As is immediately clear, the pair are obscenely fond of young bodies. They sit in a car watching teenage girls practise netball moves. The youngsters’ flesh is rendered otherworldly by a camera that, unhinged from real time, goes at what can only be described as a manic crawl. The title is not even up on screen. Yet already we feel as if we’re trapped in a beautiful rung of hell.
Young’s protagonist is bolshie schoolgirl Vicki (Ashleigh Cummings, who won a Best Actress award at the Venice Film Festival), so freaked out by her parents’ divorce that she becomes easy pickings for John and Evelyn. The sequence in which she’s drugged and chained to the bed in the couple’s suburban home is almost too distressing to watch (or listen to). As Nights in White Satin belts out of the speakers, John and Evelyn start to have sex in front of Vicki. If you’ve ever felt aroused by The Moody Blues’ ballad, expect to feel your loins implode.
Hounds of Love is a reminder that men can make feminist films. Like recent indie movie Berlin Syndrome, Young’s offering boasts a male psychopath and a resourceful victim (not to mention a protective mother). Yet the movies are poles apart. While Cate Shortland’s heroine is never more than the sum of her much-ogled parts, Young’s has a point of view that can’t be ignored.
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The result is psychologically impressive and fiendishly involving. Everything — from the flawless cast to the malnourished decors and oppressive, electronic soundtrack — hooks us into the teen’s fight for survival. At the start of the movie she’s trying to write an essay on To Kill a Mockingbird.
It will never happen, but I would like to live in a world where adolescents write essays on Hounds of Love.
Cert 18, 108 mins
