Taking place over a single night, Kamal Lazraq’s feature debut Hounds follows a father and son, Hassan (Abdellatif Masstouri) and Issam (Ayoub Elaid), as they scramble to dispose of a body when a kidnapping job goes awry. Their journey through the Moroccan criminal underworld takes them from shady bars in Casablanca to abandoned farmlands of the countryside. At every turn they are foiled by random chance: a drunken fisherman, a busted engine, even a donkey.

There is something farcical about the series of mishaps, but tragedy runs throughout. Whereas in most crime thrillers a killing is a given, every character in Hounds is horrified by the thought of it. Hassan is plagued by nightmares of the man he accidentally suffocated, while their fisherman friend Larbi (Lahcen Zaimouzen) mourns for the man’s soul and insists they wash the body before disposing of it. Even the villain of the piece, Jellouta (Mohamed Kharbouchi), is saddened when he finds out about the murder of his lackey, who himself was reluctant to hit someone on his boss’ orders.

Lit in red as if in hell, the characters are stuck forever in a world of crime and death, and we can only watch as the young Issam is dragged into this nightmare by his well-meaning father. While the sequence of failures eventually begins to feel repetitive, Hounds nevertheless manages to pack an emotional wallop with its insistence that criminals are people too, desperate to be treated and to treat each other with dignity even as they are forced into violence by circumstance. 

Hounds, GFT and Cineworld, Tuesday 5 March, as part of Glasgow Film Festival.