Putting the rugged twist on the serial-killer subgenre, Australian director Ben Young's stellar debut concerns the young girl in 1987 Perth named Vicki (Ashleigh Cumming) who, after another row with her mother about her parents' separation. is lured back to the home of the couple (Emma Booth and Stephen Curry) that, it turns out, has deviant plans for her. From an opening POV pan across a schoolyard populated by nubile teenage girls to the many shots in which Young's camera pulls back from closed façades, Hounds of Love conveys a chilling sense of unspeakable horrors being perpetrated just out of everyday view—thus lending the proceedings a faux-based-on-real-events grittiness and immediacy. As it slowly elucidates the parent-child issues plaguing both its captors and their captive, the film develops into a chilling portrait of male domination and female liberation, all while providing, at every turn, an almost unbearable amount of methodical, nail-biting suspense.