Even the opening credits of “The Pack” are tough. We witness an incident filmed in realistic real time: a girl in school uniform is in the sights of a video camera. A male voice gives instructions: “Stay like this. Lower your eyes. Breathe gently. Relax yourself. Do it after me. ”Corrections, repetitions, an awkward rhythm arises, the suspicion that something bad is taking its course here. The camera zooms in closer to the deeply breathing Sofía (Mariana Di Girólamo). You can see their uncertainty. “Imitate a sound. The letter A. “The voice drives her:“ Let me hear it ”and asks:“ Do you feel a tingling sensation? ”The man, whose second camera only shows his mouth for a moment, laughs while the girl always does more stretched "A" gasps - until the man is satisfied.
Is that abuse?
There can be no doubt for observers.
The sequences are a testimony to sexual and psychological violence.
The man, Ossandón (Marcelo Alonso), is an acting teacher at an elite Catholic school in Santiago de Chile.
From here the privileged go to America to study.
In the male rugby team, the pride of the school principal Father Belmar (Francisco Reyes), they practice superiority in preparation for the career that their parents expect.
The video recording, says Ossandón, is part of a casting in which another girl has to give a woman giving birth that screams like an orgasm.
Just a game, no one forced them to take part, says Ossandón.
Acting has to do with crossing borders.
A "wolf" in the darknet
One knows the argument from the MeToo debates. In the often shocking images of the Chilean series, the Chilean director Pablo Larraín shows with the co-producer, the Argentine author Lucía Puenzo, that the humiliated girls, around fifteen years old, are insecure and vulnerable in the abuse situation, but not powerless as a solidary group "The pack" clearly. But that is not how it remains.
Under the conspiracy myth of a “wolf” recruiting “soldiers” in the Darknet, men gather to hunt women, kidnap, rape groups and expose individual women to Facebook who are to be “assigned their place”. For the followers of the "wolf" there is a state of war that justifies every means of male oppression. A return to dictatorship is imperative for them. The civil disobedience that the girls begin by blocking their school in order to get the public to look into the Ossandón case is a sign of female chaos for the “soldiers”. Blanca (Antonia Giesen), the leader of the school protest, is abducted and has disappeared. Someone later posted a video of her gang rape. Her digital-savvy sister Celeste (Paula Luchsinger) finds out about the “game of the wolf”.A tattoo on Blanca's neck, made unnoticed, marked her as prey.
In eight episodes, the series escalates to a horrific state of war between the sexes. The horror arises from the almost naturalistic filmed view of Chilean society. “The pack” only takes the MeToo debate as a starting point. The turning away of the school officials and the solidarity of the college with the teacher, who portrays himself as the victim of hysterical adolescents, are only the key to a broad prospectus that takes into account the mentality of the Chilean military dictatorship under Pinochet, on the other hand machismo as the root of Understanding oppression and blaming a Catholicism based on the godly rule of men over women. The mash of justifications for the characters portrayed also includes hatred of women tinged with legal policy,who blames any mortification of the male ego on women who advocate equality.
More than a thriller
The plot moves towards a crime thriller in which three female police officers try to unravel an intricately networked series of murders while their own children and their past are targeted.
Olivia Fernández (Antonia Zegers), Elisa Murillo (Daniela Vega) and Carla Farías (María Gracia Omegna) have sons, daughters, husbands and violent ex-men who become the play material of the "wolf".
Dramaturgically this amounts to exposure, but the unmasking of the psychos is still the least interesting thing about “The Pack”.
The series looks hyper-realistic - and only a few steps away into the future.