Kamal Lazraq is a Moroccan film-maker who had been a prize winner at Cannes for his student film Drari; now he makes his feature debut with this tough, violent and extravagantly black-comic drama-thriller set, like much of his previous work, in the tough streets of Casablanca.
Abdellatif Masstouri and Ayoub Elaid play Hassan and Issam: a father-and-son team who scratch a living working as low-level goons for a local mobster called Dib (Abdellatif Lebkiri). Dib gets our incompetent heroes to kidnap a rival tough guy as revenge for a dispute about a dog fight, in which he believes that his beloved canine contender was unfairly matched with a dog on some kind of drug. After some absurd anxiety about the van they’re going to use, Hassan and Issam set about beating up and bundling their victim into the back of their cramped, borrowed vehicle and the result is catastrophic. We follow them in what is effectively real time as they roam through the city trying to clean up the terrible mess they’ve made, afraid, of course, of the awful retribution from Dib.
There are hints of Quentin Tarantino, Nicolas Winding Refn and Alejandro González Iñárritu (especially his 2000 film Amores Perros) in this punchy, scrappy film whose two lead characters (the pathetic “hounds” of the title) 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.
• Hounds is in UK cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema from 14 June.
