Hounds of Love lives and dies on the performances by Cummings and Booth, who are both exquisite. An extremely rough watch from Ben Young, who tried to distance himself from the Birnies' true crime story, but the inspiration is as clear as day.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Mar 25, 2025

Intense performances and a few truly hypnotic music cues help push the film into a unique portrayal of the highs and lows of humanity.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 12, 2023

The film is driven by three savage central performances. Booth particularly is shattering, making Evelyn a broken woman who asked the worst possible man to fix her.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 4, 2021

In the third act this film goes wild and it's definitely a tension-building exhilarating watch... but it's not for those people that like full-on horror.

| Original Score: 6/10 | Apr 23, 2021

Cummings' portrayal of the resourceful and tenacious young heroine [...] glues the audience to the screen, ensuring we remain deeply invested every step of the way.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 3, 2020

[Hounds of Love's] more memorable and chilling than any of its gorier counterparts could hope to be.

| Oct 9, 2019

For those with the emotional wherewithal to endure it, however, Hounds of Love is a rewardingly nuanced thriller.

| Jul 24, 2019

Hounds of Love is not only a terrifying psychological thriller, but an in depth look at how women who step out of prescribed roles overcome criticism, sexism and brutality with inner strength.

| May 16, 2019

At the film's core is the question, what if some love is based not on love but in a dichotomy of horrific power and desire?

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | May 1, 2019

An impeccably shot, carefully crafted thriller.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Apr 9, 2019

The film is gripping but stomach-turning, only "effective" in the worst possible ways.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Mar 29, 2019

Maybe don't think Kate Bush though Hounds Of Love is a dark and violent Antipodean thriller that will probably send you Running Up That Hill, Breathing heavily and maybe screaming Babooshka!

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 30, 2018

It's a brutal, dark, all-too-probable thriller that effectively does every genre thing you'd expect.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 18, 2018

Hounds of Love disappoints as well as disgusts by leaning too far into 'torture porn', all the while leaving far too little to the imagination.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 25, 2018

That air of gritty realism, shorn of typical slasher-flick misogynist titillation, makes the film often seem punishingly graphic-even though the worst of the torturing abuses Vicki and a predecessor suffer are actually left offscreen...

| Apr 19, 2018

A brutal cinematic experience ... Hounds of Love feels like a true-crime thriller (though it is entirely fictional), carefully constructed with period details.

| Feb 25, 2018

...a film that will leave you unsettled and will challenge your view on what it means to be a villain and what it means to be a victim...

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 24, 2018

Australian writer/director Ben Young makes a strong debut with Hounds of Love...

| Dec 19, 2017

Subtexts aside, Hounds of Love is also an expert exercise in suspense, taut as the wire of a Hills Hoist.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 27, 2017

I guess I wish that Young, who clearly has skills, had tried his hand at something more thematically rewarding than a teen-ager's torment at the hands of a murderous pervert and his cowed partner.

| Aug 30, 2017