Aussie writer-director Ben Young’s debut feature opens on a netball court. The camera zeroes in on the teenage girls playing, their glistening thighs shot in stylish slow-mo. This lascivious gaze belongs to creepy couple John (Stephen Curry) and Evie (Emma Booth), a pair of married, redneck serial killers who roam suburban Perth picking off young girls to torture and kill for kicks.
As a genre exercise, it’s a terse, queasily effective thriller, with one shocking moment involving rich kid Vicki (Ashleigh Cummings), soundtracked memorably by the Moody Blues’ 1967 hit Nights in White Satin. Ideas-wise, there’s less going on; the female archetypes (the tough single mum, the abused wife) are used to justify the graphic, titillating violence. Frustrating, too, is the film’s abrupt climax, which feels engineered to serve a final song choice selected specifically for its 80s cool.
