FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL: The first act of Franck Richard’s French/Belgian co-production The Pack is a well-played but conventional horror-movie set-up: 'lone girl picks up hitchhiker then arrives at remote cafe’.
This opening narrative salvo is Horror 101 (if there were any video stores left, the rental shelves would be lined with hundreds of B-movie nasties that start in a similar way). Richard’s atmospherics and rich staging of these early moments shows he is a genre fan of the sort that his audience would appreciate; the kind of filmgoer who has sought out The Pack will not be a first-time horror watcher (I pity those adventurous French Film Festival patrons who visit this film sight unseen, just because it’s been programmed... Seigneur ont miséricorde!)
The film finds its surest footing about 25 minutes into its slow-boil story, when our heroine Charlotte (the game Émilie Dequenne) goes snooping around after dark for her new friend Max (Benjamin Biolay) in the men’s room of the dusty, dimly-lit truck-stop owned by La Spack (the terrific Yolande Moreau). When Charlotte awakens, encaged and in chains, she witnesses the consequences of an escape attempt (a fellow prisoner tries to flee with sickening consequences), and is led out into the darkness of the surrounding woods.
The unrelenting griminess of the film’s interiors is echoed in this outdoor sequence – the long grasses (which become integral to our heroine’s journey) give way to plains of grey dirt; in the centre of this expanse is a shed. From the shed, La Spack watches on as Charlotte and fellow captive Tofu (Ian Fonteyn) are strung up and their blood is smeared on the soil about them. As the fog rolls in and the moon casts a shimmering pall, the ground begins to give way; soon, the intended recipients of La Spack’s human offerings make themselves known...
Franck Richard spins his damsel-in-distress slasher film into a nihilistic monster movie very effectively. Most films would have happily settled on Moreau’s cafe owner as the central villain, so effortlessly sinister is 'La Spack’ in the hands of the veteran Cesar winner. But Richard’s introduction of the film’s truly hellish bad guys – a wordless series of intercut jolts that ratchet up the horror frame by frame – is masterful; imagine Michael Jackson’s 'Thriller’ clip in the hands of Lucio Fulci. There is a tangible element of unrelenting, insurmountable terror about The Pack that mirrors the best of the genre (for Aussie audiences that will be Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek, which Richard’s film echoes in its rich depiction of mud- and blood-stained peril.)
Richard stumbles in his handling of some dark humour – the tone shifts when a leery town cop (Phillipe Nahon) enters the picture, wearing a t-shirt bearing the bold message 'I fuck on the first date’, and a trio of leather-clad bikers show up, keen for some male-rape, but they all seem rather ill-defined, and their fate in a film like this, is inevitable. Finally, the 360 degree story arc ends on a familiar device that reverts to genre cliché in far less convincing manner than the director’s opening gambit.
If these shortcomings mean The Pack doesn’t quite reach the heights of such Gallic gross-out masterpieces as Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs (2008), Alexandre Aja’s Haute tension (2003) or Alexandre Bustillo’s and Julien Maury’s À l'intérieur (2007), neither do they hinder the overall effectiveness of Richard’s film as a shocking and emphatically forceful work of Euro-horror.
