Readers familiar with films in any capacity will likely assume that Hounds of Love is the story of a scrappy survivor’s ingenuity – and, to be sure, it’s impossible not to root for Vicki, cheering her breakthroughs and gasping at her hardships. Everything in the above synopsis is true, but I suspect it may give a false sense of the film’s story. As time wears on, however, she begins to spot cracks in her captors’ relationship, and begins working her surroundings to wrangle an escape. Inevitably, Vicki winds up in the couple’s clutches. Unfortunately, by the time she gets in their car, we’ve already seen a Cliff’s Notes montage of John and Evelyn’s M.O.: a leering shot of lithe teenage tennis players, a friendly offer of a lift, a wrist chained to a bedpost, a pile of blood-spattered towels, a shallow grave in a pine barren. Grounded by her mother after some lackluster grades, Vicki sneaks out to a party, and soon takes a detour to buy some weed from friendly couple John and Evelyn (Stephen Curry and Emma Booth). Hounds tells the story of Vicki Maloney (Ashleigh Cummings), a sullen Australian teenager coping with her parents’ divorce. All of which is a shame, because it distracts from a gripping, devastating work in its own right. While the story of the film differs enough that Young didn’t feel the need to include a “based on a true story” tag, the similarities were picked up by the couple’s sole surviving victim, who went public with her displeasure.
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Such is the case with first-time director Ben Young, whose debut feature, Hounds of Love, is loosely based on the so-called “Moorhouse murders” of David and Catherine Birnie.
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While this approach frees the filmmaker to mold events to tell their own story, it also opens them up to charges of exploitation and callousness. If there’s one genre more fraught with peril than true crime, it’s “true” crime – films and stories inspired by true events, without being bound by the facts as they happened. BUFF19, Film BUFF19 REVIEW: Hounds of Love (2016) dir.