Hounds review – grim and quirky Moroccan crime drama

A winner at last year’s Cannes, this by turns grim and quirky crime drama, from Kamal Lazraq, is set in Casablanca and lit like a Caravaggio painting. A macho, feckless and sporadically pious Moroccan ex-con (Abdellatif Masstouri) ropes his adult son (Ayoub Elaid) into doing a “small job” for a dog-obsessed gangster. Over the ensuing 12 hours, father and son spin around town with a problematically XL corpse, encountering a series of volpine/toothless/insidiously sozzled figures, who offer help (of sorts). 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.

• In cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema