It’s a David Lynch world, and we just live in it: for quite some time now, the idea that the conformist keep-to-yourself conservatism of the suburbs can conceal unspeakable depravity is almost well duh. And on the evidence of his striking, queasy debut, Ben Young is very much a child of Lynch in this regard. Plotting a […]

Sharks strike again, a box office smash comedy, Australian serial killers, and a tense war drama

A creepy couple kill young girls for kicks in this Aussie thriller littered with female archetypes

What is it about Australian filmmakers and down-and-dirty, no-holds-barred crime dramas? This is a fearsomely accomplished first feature: a kidnapping thriller

Filmmaker Ben Young’s Aussie serial-killing saga provides a haunting examination of patriarchal oppression.

An ugly film whose ambitions are never matched by its creators' limited abilities

A deft reimagination of the serial-killer genre

Dir/scr. Ben Young. Australia, 2016, 108 mins.

Australian director Ben Young's debut offers a bold new spin on the serial-killer genre.

Ben Young’s brilliant drama, based on a real-life serial killer couple who preyed on teenage girls, is beautifully photographed and unwatchably painful

A kidnap victim (Ashleigh Cummings), kept under lock and key in a spare bedroom by an experienced pair of married abductors (Emma Booth and Stephen Curry) slowly — and I do mean slowly — sizes up the couple’s relationship and decides to try pitting captor against captor to enable her escape. It’s not a bad “based on a true story” premise, but it doesn’t really kick in until well over halfway into the picture. By then, the snail’s-pace horizontal pans, under-the-flight-path score, and other arthouse affectations had collided with the overall unlikeability of the major characters violently enough to make me consider jumping ship. I didn’t — a decision I lived to regret once the subsequent rape scene concluded with a closeup cutaway to a grinning toy pig. For a film whose main goal is to send audiences home feeling like crap, this ain’t nuthin’ but a dogged Hound. Written and directed by newcomer Ben Young.