Keswick Film Club - Hounds

Synopsis

When his prized dog loses a fight, local mobster Dib gets a couple of cheap goons, Hassan and Issam, to kidnap his rival. What could possibly go wrong? Just about everything as it turns out. We follow Hassan and Issam in almost real time through the surroundings of Casablanca as they try to recover from their initial mistake, only to get into more and more problems... Afraid all the while, of course, of the awful retribution from Dib.

"There are hints of Quentin Tarantino, Nicolas Winding Refn and Alejandro González Iñárritu in this punchy, scrappy film whose two lead characters are all too obviously less important to the criminal overlords than the actual dogs in their macho contests. The film is perhaps flawed by its ending, which loses a bit of narrative momentum and insists too strenuously on the metaphorical properties, but there is a tang of real evil in the story's chaos and its final image" - Peter Bradshaw, Guardian.