The Pack

ThePack1It’s a tough life being a teenager, but it’s not much more fun being an adult. Sophie wants away from the remote farmhouse she shares with her younger brother Henry and their parents, anything to be out of the middle of nowhere, somewhere she could have a life and not have her mother complaining about her making long distance phone calls, her only contact with her friends.

It’s no picnic for Adam and Carla, either. They have money problems as it is, exacerbated by their rapidly diminishing flock, Adam finding more dead sheep on the hillside when he rides out to check on them and burning the carcasses, a lot of them. He’s been setting traps, but to no avail, whatever is prowling the hills as cunning as it is vicious.

ThePack2An unexpected visit from the man from the bank brings no joy, cold and patronising as he talks of “this little animal hospital of yours,” making a final offer on the farmhouse and warning them that if they don’t accept it the bank will foreclose and they’ll lose it all anyway.

“Maybe dad should have taken the offer on the house and we could have rejoined civilisation,” Sophie snaps angrily, but for the banker the trip back to the city is curtailed; stepping beneath the trees to answer the call of nature he is set upon by a pack of wild dogs who continue to hunt into the night, approaching the Wilson’s homestead.

Not to be coThePack3nfused with the similarly themed 1977 American horror or the 2010 French cannibal film La Meute, with the dialogue as sparse as the population for much of the film it is up to the visuals to carry the film, the four lead actors – Animal Kingdom‘s Anna Lise Phillips, Underbelly‘s Jack Campbell and newcomers Katie Moore and Hamish Phillips in their feature debut – required to do little more than look brave (the adults) or scared but determined (the children).

The swooping camera prowling through the twilight forest may remind of Dog Soldiers, but on the other side of the world from the Scottish Highlands, The Pack is neither a werewolf movie nor will there be many laughs, with even gallows humour in short supply. Filmed and set in the forests of Southern Australia, the opening scenes are informed by the vastness of its outdoor locations, as much a character as any of the humans, but the bulk of the film is the siege situation within the confines of the farmhouse.

ThePack5A greater problem is that the supposedly feral dogs are too cute to be threatening, too well-groomed and obviously healthy to be fighting for survival, nor are they consuming the carcasses, simply killing and moving on. The wrangling of the animals is impressive but they are gorgeous rather than terrifying or intimidating, nor does former commercial director Nick Robertson generate any tension from Evan Randall Green’s script.

The threat never developing into something overpowering, it doesn’t feel like it is a film of a beginning, a middle and an end so much as an introduction followed by one extended scene once the sun has gone down. Presumably intended to convey the intensity of the dangerous night, it just seems to meander shapelessly and aimlessly, the family oddly concerned about keeping quiet and staying in the dark even though the the dogs are surely hunting by scent.

ThePack4While Carla is no-nonsense in a crisis and Adam is as capable as any rugged outdoorsy Australian farmhand should be, there is a frustrating absence of thought required to keep the minimal plot moving; they’re supposedly self-reliant, yet they don’t seem to have a screwdriver to fix the phone when the cable is torn from the wall, and when they hear the police car arrive it never occurs to him to open an upstairs window to call a warning while remaining protected themselves.

Packaged with an eight minute “making of” which is little more than publicity material, snippets of interviews with the cast and key crew, fairly technical with little insight into the ideas behind the film, Robertson says he wanted to create a film of “atmosphere, suspense and good character development,” all of which he has failed on, the only theme which could have raised the film being the incompatibility of nature and modern life, an idea abandoned as swiftly as the unfortunate banker is despatched.

The Pack is released on DVD on Monday 7th March

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