HOUNDS OF LOVE (2016)

Studio:       Filmbuff
Director:    Ben Young
Writer:       Ben Young
Producer:  Melissa Kelly
Stars:     Emma Booth, Ashleigh Cummings, Stephen Curry, Susie Porter, Damian de Montemas, Harrison Gilbertson

Review Score:

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Summary:

A captive teenager fights to free herself from the troubled husband and wife who abducted her.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Perth, Western Australia – December 1987 – Under the pretense of offering a ride on her walk home from school, married couple John and Evelyn White abduct teenager Gabby Donovan. After torturing and sexually abusing the captive girl, John kills Gabby and buries her body in the woods.

Struggling with her parents’ separation and grounded for having her boyfriend Jason Farris write her term paper, Vicki Maloney sneaks out of her mother Maggie’s house during the night. Cruising the street, John and Evelyn con Vicki into coming back to their house where she is drugged and taken captive.

Over the course of her captivity, Vicki observes the fractured dynamic between domineering John and submissive Evelyn, who has been emotionally broken since her children were taken away. Loan shark Gary shakes down John for money he owes when John buys cigarettes at a store in town. Evelyn forces Vicki to write a letter to her mother claiming that she ran away.

Evelyn’s paranoia and jealously swell when John locks himself in the bathroom with Vicki. Feeling rejected, Evelyn pushes herself sexually onto John. Vicki uses the distraction to attempt an escape, but is forced back by the dog that John gifted to Evelyn. A neighbor responds to the commotion, but Evelyn angrily dismisses him from the door.

Maggie Maloney goes with her estranged husband Trevor to the police station to report Vicki’s disappearance. Sergeant Mathews dismisses Vicki as a probable runaway and refuses to investigate until after the weekend. Trevor takes Maggie home where they find Vicki’s strange handwritten letter.

While Evelyn is out of the house, John sexually assaults Vicki until she defecates on the bed sheets. Evelyn returns home and becomes suspicious about the situation, as John is not supposed to sexually engage with Vicki unless Evelyn also participates. When Evelyn asks her what happened, Vicki gets into Evelyn’s head by suggesting that John is just using Evelyn to assert power and does not really love her.

Distressed that John is attracted to Vicki, Evelyn tells her husband to kill the girl immediately. John balks, prompting Evelyn to put a knife to her own throat. John calls Evelyn’s suicide bluff and gradually coerces her into joining him in assaulting Vicki. After her torturous rape, Vicki becomes more psychologically broken and catatonic.

Maggie notices something curious about Vicki’s letter and contacts Jason. Jason discovers that Vicki hid a code in her words identifying where she is being held.

Frustrated when the dog defecates in the house again, John beats Evelyn’s dog to death. In tears, Evelyn is unable to stop him.

Maggie, Trevor, and Jason take Vicki’s coded message to the police. When Sergeant Henderson says he won’t investigate the address until several hours later, the trio elects to go there themselves.

John tells Evelyn to have Vicki write another letter before killing her. As Vicki begins taking diazepam pills, Gary comes to the house looking for payment from John, who opens the door.

At the same time, Maggie frantically screams for her daughter across the street, as Vicki had mistaken the address. Evelyn puts a knife to Vicki’s throat as a threat to not scream in response to her mother’s shouting. Maggie eventually gives up and gets back in the car with Trevor and Jason.

With the rescue attempt foiled, Vicki refuses to take more pills, daring Evelyn to kill her with the knife. Frustrated, John starts strangling Vicki with his bare hands.

When John barks an order at her, Evelyn has a sudden change of heart and stabs her husband in the back. John turns around in shock. Evelyn repeatedly stabs John in his stomach until he collapses on the kitchen floor.

Vicki escapes out the bathroom window as Jason and her parents start pulling away. Holding the bloody knife, Evelyn confronts Vicki in the driveway. However, Vicki calmly strides past the other woman as Evelyn does nothing in response.

Maggie looks in the rearview mirror and sees Vicki in the street. Trevor stops the car and Vicki tearfully reunites with her mother.

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Review:

Truly, I cannot conceive of a real-life horror more chilling than abduction followed by hopeless captivity.  Consider the case of Colleen Stan, certainly an inspiration for the fictional story in “Hounds of Love.”  Kidnapped at age 20 by a married couple, Stan was held as a sex slave for seven years, spending as much as 23 hours a day in a box underneath a bed for three consecutive years.  Stan’s psyche was broken so badly through brainwashing that, like Elizabeth Smart after her, she eventually submitted to her situation and ignored open opportunities for escape.

Or there is the house of horrors operated by Ariel Castro in Cleveland.  Over an 11-year period, Castro subjected three young women to repeated assaults with neighbors none the wiser.

Not all victims in similar circumstances are randomly selected targets.  Few can forget Josef Fritzl, who kept his daughter and the children he forcibly fathered concealed in a basement corridor behind eight locked doors.  Meanwhile, Fritzl and his wife went about an unassuming life of their own upstairs.

Making such stories more frightening is that fact that these are just ones we know about, and at least they end in the victim’s release and the culprit’s capture.  As of December 2016, the National Crime Information Center maintains over 88,000 active missing person records, and that is only the United States.  How many of these people are currently undergoing unthinkable ordeals in soundproofed cellars, with no one having any idea where they are or how to find them?

“Hounds of Love” peers into the shadows shrouding one such situation for a harrowing examination of a victim’s survivor spirit being dismantled while the bond between her captors unravels.  Writer/director Ben Young’s unflinching feature debut succumbs to an occasional spell of cinematic sensationalism.  But the movie otherwise excels as a precisely plotted character study set in a next-door neighbor nightmare guaranteed to turn knuckles white with excruciating intensity.

As Evelyn, one half of the married pair responsible for the chains on Vicki’s wrists, puts it later, if Vicki had only listened to her mother and not sneaked out of the house, none of this would have happened.  Instead, an attitude rattled by her parents’ separation as well as mom’s justified grounding primed Vicki to fall for a ruse resulting in abduction.

Now Vicki is held prisoner in a small house not far from her mother’s home.  It may as well be the middle of nowhere though, because no one knows where she is.

Evelyn’s husband John has unspeakable plans in store, just as he did for the now dead schoolgirl who previously occupied Vicki’s bed.  Evelyn is in a psychological prison of her own, preoccupied with desperation for retrieving her state-removed children while remaining fearfully subservient to John.  Vicki quickly clues into this disparity in the couple’s dynamic.  Widening that chasm might be the key to escape, provided Vicki can struggle through the suffering and make it out unbroken.

“Hounds of Love” hits so close to home with its practically “ripped from the headlines” premise that it is an undeniably uncomfortable watch.  However, that discomfort is purposeful.  “Hounds of Love” fearlessly prods the psychological pain of a tormented captive, a conflicted accomplice, and a shattered parent frantically fighting to find any route back to normalcy.

But Ben Young is cautious about how this material is handled.  Sights are set on suspense, not tabloid theatrics of violent fantasy.  Assaults are implied rather than graphically illustrated, although tension stays so tight, it feels like you see more than the movie actually shows.

A few minutes of fat hiccup here and there.  The tumultuous marriage drama between Vicki’s parents is essential for shaping her understanding of unbalanced relationships.  But a solo scene of those two parents dancing around possible reconciliation is a speed bump to Vicki’s core story.

Even though it pulls off the trick, a “Silence of the Lambs” switcheroo stinks of being a too convenient timing device.  A couple of overly dramatic beats, some made more so by the addition of slow motion, could also stand to swell half as much.

Minor moments of misdirected or emphasized melodrama bounce off the film’s fierceness, however.  “Hounds of Love” has a stark vibe of sinister suburban secrets laid bare rarely seen since “Last House on the Left.”  These people and their plights feel authentic.  And daring to stare into their downward spirals with unafraid eyes creates a terrifyingly tense experience of frighteningly realistic horror.

Review Score:  80

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