SLEEPING DOGS

Alcoholic, abusive Griffin Willow lives with his emotionally distant wife and their five deeply disturbed children on a run-down farm in rural Australia. They run a tourist trailer park that guests never visit twice. Kate Hosking's performance gives this grim story an objective distance that listeners will appreciate. Hosking's sultry voice with its matter-of-fact yet ominous delivery brings an unsentimental pathos to the brutality of everyday living. The Willows's hardscrabble existence includes violence, incest, murder, and madness, each as common as the bloody slaughtering of sheep or the snarling of vicious dogs. Hartnett's bleak portrait of loneliness and survival and Hosking's intelligent narration paint a tragic picture, terrible in its realism. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine [Published: APR/ MAY 07]