Bon Appétit, or Maybe Not
France has given the world many fine things: croissants, existentialism, and horror films that make you question the meaning of life and dinner. Sadly, The Pack (La meute, 2010), directed by Franck Richard, is not one of them.
This grimy slice of backwoods horror premiered at Cannes—yes, Cannes—proving that even the world’s most prestigious film festival occasionally enjoys slumming it in the cinematic dumpster. The movie aims for darkly comic carnage, a mash-up of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Delicatessen, but ends up as a lukewarm stew of clichés, cow bones, and missed opportunities.
If you’ve ever wanted to see a film that combines cannibalism, roadside diners, and people making inexplicably bad life choices—all without a hint of tension—then congratulations, The Pack is your Michelin-starred mediocrity.
Charlotte’s Bad Day (and Ours)
Our protagonist, Charlotte (Émilie Dequenne), is a spunky, cigarette-smoking traveler whose main character trait is “exists.” After a scuffle with some bikers—who apparently wandered in from a Mad Max cosplay convention—she picks up a hitchhiker named Max (Benjamin Biolay). Because nothing says “great decisions” like inviting a stranger with murder-movie cheekbones into your car in rural France.
They stop at La Spack, a restaurant so filthy it makes truck-stop bathrooms look like Versailles. The establishment is run by La Spack herself (Yolande Moreau), a matronly woman who looks like she’s been pickled in vinegar and despair. You know she’s bad news the moment she smiles—it’s the kind of smile that says “I’m definitely going to feed you to something later.”
Max excuses himself to use the restroom, which is always the first mistake in a horror movie, and promptly disappears. Charlotte goes searching for him, as any genre-appropriate victim would, and discovers that the restaurant doubles as a people farm. Surprise! The kitchen serves more than just meatloaf—it serves meat-loaf.
The Restaurant at the End of Logic
From here, The Pack shifts from “French road thriller” to “underground zombie buffet.” Charlotte gets knocked out, caged, and introduced to La Spack’s family—an actual pack of ghoulish cannibals who live in the basement and only come out for midnight snacks.
What kind of snacks, you ask? Oh, you know… tourists, drifters, and anyone dumb enough to stop for lunch on a foggy road in northern France.
The problem isn’t that the premise is absurd—it’s that it’s absurd without conviction. The film wants to be grotesque and atmospheric, but it’s mostly just damp. It’s the kind of movie where you can smell the mud through the screen, and not in an immersive way.
Les Misérables (But With Cannibals)
Émilie Dequenne (Rosetta) does her best as the plucky heroine, but the script gives her about as much emotional range as a GPS voice. She screams, she escapes, she gets recaptured—it’s horror Mad Libs.
Benjamin Biolay, as Max, spends most of the film being dead, undead, or dramatically irrelevant. His character exists mainly as a red herring in a leather jacket. The real showpiece here is Yolande Moreau as La Spack, chewing scenery (and people) with equal enthusiasm. She’s genuinely unsettling, like a rural French version of Kathy Bates who dropped the wine and picked up a shovel.
Then there’s Philippe Nahon as Chinaski, a retired cop who becomes the movie’s most perplexing subplot. He stumbles in midway through the film, investigating disappearances, smoking existentially, and contributing approximately nothing to the plot. He’s like if Columbo had amnesia and a nicotine addiction.
A Feast for the Eyes (If the Eyes Like Mud)
Visually, The Pack is drenched in grime and overcast skies. Everything looks brown, wet, and vaguely sticky—like the cinematographer accidentally dropped the lens in soup and just kept rolling. You can practically feel the tetanus.
The movie tries for a bleak, painterly atmosphere—a French arthouse horror aesthetic—but it mostly looks like someone smeared pâté on the camera. Even the gory scenes are strangely antiseptic; limbs are torn, blood splatters, but it all feels oddly flat, like a food fight filmed in slow motion.
There’s no sense of escalation, no rhythm to the carnage. Just the constant thud of the soundtrack’s “ominous strings” telling you something scary should be happening, even when it isn’t.
The Plot Eats Itself
One of the film’s biggest sins is confusion. It can’t decide if it’s a black comedy, a social allegory, or just a gross-out freak show. One minute, it’s parodying French rural stereotypes; the next, it’s brooding about moral decay. Then suddenly—bam!—we’re back to flesh-eating monsters clawing at a cage.
The titular “pack” of cannibal ghouls appears sparingly, possibly because the production could only afford to light them twice. When we do see them, they look like rejected extras from The Descent—pale, slimy, and extremely underwhelming. They’re supposed to be terrifying, but mostly they just resemble hungover festival-goers.
By the time the movie lurches into its third act, everyone’s either dead, dying, or wishing they were. The finale features gunfire, blood, and a level of chaos that might’ve been exciting if it weren’t so incoherent. It’s less “showdown with monsters” and more “camera fell down a flight of stairs.”
Thematic Depth of a Puddle
Director Franck Richard has said he wanted to explore “the primal fear of isolation” and “human savagery.” Admirable goals! But the film’s philosophical ambitions dissolve faster than a baguette in soup. Any potential social commentary about consumption—literal or metaphorical—is buried under layers of cheap shocks and cheaper lighting.
Instead of making us ponder humanity’s darker impulses, The Pack mostly makes us ponder how long it’s been since we last checked our watch. The movie runs just 84 minutes but somehow feels like a weekend trip to rural purgatory.
The Horror of Missed Potential
It’s a shame, because there’s a genuinely creepy movie somewhere in here—one that could’ve married French extremitywith folklore horror. You can see glimmers of it in the performances and the premise. But those glimmers are drowned in repetitive scenes, murky cinematography, and a tone that wobbles like bad jelly.
Even the score can’t decide whether it’s supposed to scare us or sedate us. It drones endlessly, like a dying accordion, while characters make increasingly terrible decisions. By the end, you’re rooting for the cannibals, not because they’re sympathetic, but because they might finally end the movie.
The Aftertaste
When The Pack premiered at Cannes, some critics hailed it as “a return to gritty French horror.” Others were less kind, describing it as “meatloaf with extra confusion.” I lean toward the latter. It’s not offensively bad—it’s just frustratingly mediocre, a horror movie that forgets to horrify and a satire that forgets to be clever.
By the time the credits roll, you’ll feel a strange mix of hunger, nausea, and existential regret—the cinematic equivalent of eating undercooked escargot at a gas station.
Final Verdict
The Pack tries to serve us a gourmet meal of terror and ends up delivering lukewarm leftovers from the Euro-horror buffet. It’s grim but not scary, gory but not shocking, and weirdly polite for a movie about cannibal hillbillies.
Yolande Moreau gives it some bite, but the rest is a half-digested mess that leaves you craving a different kind of horror—one with seasoning, stakes, and maybe a napkin.
Final Grade: D+
A tepid stew of clichés and cold cuts. Even the cannibals would send it back.
