#Hounds of love plot series

International audiences may not be familiar with the details of the Perth couple’s predations, but from an Australian perspective the similarities are clear. I looked up the Birnie house on a real-estate website and the layout of the house in Hounds of Love is almost identical Alexandra Heller-Nicholas Reports from early in the film’s production, however, suggest that the Birnies in particular were very much on the film-makers’ minds. Writer-director Ben Young has said that he drew on accounts of nine different murderous couples in developing the script, which explores the psychological dependencies that lead female killers to assist their partners in murder. The film-makers, for their part, strongly resist the suggestion that Hounds is a true-crime story. Critics have been unable to avoid comparisons with the Birnies. A vicious dog features prominently in the film’s action, as do chains, a broken window and sleeping pills.

In the new Australian thriller Hounds of Love, a teenage girl is kidnapped and terrorised by a murderous couple in Perth in December 1987. It’s not surprising that they might eventually be used as inspiration by the nation’s film-makers. The Birnies’ infamous crimes have acquired an archetypal force in the landscape of Australian terror: the menace hiding behind the bland facades and baking concrete of endless suburban streets. They were each sentenced to life in prison (David Birnie killed himself in 2005 Catherine Birnie remains incarcerated).

#Hounds of love plot series

When, after hours of interrogation, David Birnie led police to a series of graves in Gleneagle national park, he and Catherine proved to have abducted, raped, and killed four young women in a five-week period in 1986. Emma Booth and Stephen Curry as the murderous kidnappers in Hounds of Love.