Hounds

A grim thrill rounded off with a chilling last shot.

As its central crisis deepens and darkens, Lazraq’s script keeps teasing a gear-shift into mordant farce to which it never quite commits, leaving both the characters and the drama a bit stymied. Still, this is a notably punchy debut, both visceral and confidently cavalier in its depiction of everyday underworld brutality, with a sharp, streetlit sense of place.

The circle of life and death may be warped and buckled in Hounds, but nobody can stop it turning.

There are moments when the film uneasily skirts the line between genre conventions and documentary realism, but the portrait it paints of Casablanca’s underbelly remains credible and bleak.

All creatures great and small are fighting for their lives in this blasted landscape and, though the tension often flags, the actors, many of them non-professional, give consistently good face, especially Masstouri, who resembles a leathery, bushy-haired John Garfield.

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.

As a piece of compelling and coherent narrative filmmaking, Hounds is unfortunately a fun beginning, a silly ending and with a mid-section that’s missing in action.