Society of the Snow Review

Star Cast: Enzo Vogrincic, Agustin Pardella, Matias Recalt, Tomas Wolf, Diego Vegezzi, Esteban Kukuriczka, and Francisco Romero

Director: J.A. Bayona

What’s Good: Bayona and his team match the scope of the environment with the scope of the character’s internal conflict, creating a powerful dilemma.

What’s Bad: The movie’s overreliance on narration makes some of the most potent moments feel flat when the film needs to explain all the internal turmoil in words.

Watch or Not?: This is a must-watch, especially now that we are close to the awards season.

Language: Spanish (with subtitles)

Available On: Netflix

Runtime: 144 Minutes 

 

With the Netflix original film Society of the Snow (La Sociedad de la Nieve), Spanish director J.A. Bayona—who made his name as a disaster/survival movie director with the tsunami thriller The Impossible—reclaims the real-life tragedy and tale of human resilience, including, yes, cannibalism, with a chilling realism, emotion, and restraint from sensationalism.

The film, a faithful adaptation of Uruguayan journalist Pablo Vierci's 2009 book, was created following lengthy discussions with survivors and the relatives of those who lost their lives in the snow. With a cast of relatively unknown Latin American actors going through a rigorous shoot in difficult conditions and a supervised weight-loss program that lends authenticity to the portrayal of a group stranded in freezing temperatures and on the verge of starvation, the Spanish-language retelling is equal parts spiritual and muscular.

The more accessible Sierra Nevada range in Spain served as a stand-in for the Andes Mountains, where a small amount of filming was conducted by a professional crew.

The narrative of Vierci's book is written from the viewpoints of Flight 571's sixteen survivors. However, by including the voices of the living and the dead, the screenplay by Bayona, Bernat Vilaplana, Jaime Marques-Olearraga, and Nicolás Casariego adds metaphysical dimension. This includes the audacious choice made by the latter, the story's main narrator and moral conscience, 24-year-old law student Numa Turcatti (Enzo Vogrincic).

Numa first decided not to go to Chile in order to concentrate on his academics. However, the captivating beginning in Montevideo, which is artfully captured in subdued hues that harken back to the time, depicts him falling in love with the contagious joy of the Old Christians rugby team, some of whom would be visiting countries outside of Uruguay for the first time.

When it comes to large set pieces, Bayona is at his best. Every tremor of the airplane is felt during the actual crash, which is a terrifying series of events. Starting with the initial jolts of turbulence, when the male passengers, who are primarily young, play tough guys, the situation spirals out of control as the plane becomes more unstable and the jokes made by the guys get more serious.

As the aircraft hits a mountain in the Andes in far western Argentina, there is a scary period of silence just before the impact. The fuselage is split in half, one wing is lost, the cockpit is destroyed, and the front part of the aircraft plummets down a glacier that is dubbed the Valley of Tears. As visceral as disaster scenarios get is the sight of victims being thrown from the plane, along with the sound of limbs shattering and metal crunching.

 

Twelve passengers on board—including all three crew members—die instantly, while a number of others pass away from injuries sustained in the days that follow. The crash site is invisible to rescue planes due to its blind spot, and the survivors find out that the search is abandoned after eight days through a news report on a transistor radio. After being stranded there for 72 days, two of them—Nando Parrado (Agustín Pardella) and Roberto Canessa (Matías Recalt)—are able to trek for ten days to reach Chile thanks to the milder springtime weather.

In the meanwhile, there are some tense moments, such as a five-day storm that ends in an avalanche that batters the wreckage and buries the remaining fuselage, turning it into an icebox as the survivors cling inside for warmth. Days of labor are needed to dig their way out through the damaged cockpit, which further saps their strength.

However, the majority of the drawn-out middle segment is spent waiting, shivering, and suffering as the minimal food supplies run out and the casualties rise (each one identified by name and age showing as onscreen text).

Having survived severe injuries and episodes of delirium before suffering another setback when his sister passes away, Nando is the first to say he won't hunger if there are bodies wrapped in ice that could provide nourishment. Others soon after. Given that the majority of the survivors identify as religious in some way, there is a lot of discussion among them about whether this would constitute a criminal or, worse, a sin. However, there isn't much tension as the survival story gets closer to the inevitable point at when the first corpses are dissected and eaten.

It's commendable that Bayona and his writing partners have politely declined to capitalize on the more graphic elements of cannibalism. Those sequences don't feature any gore, blood, or graphic imagery of any type. Rather, the drama primarily stays psychological as the holdouts, including the sick Numo, gradually concede defeat as hunger wears them down. As implied by the title, the bond between the living and the dead that linked the group into a secret society is established when one dying passenger allows the other survivors to consume his flesh in order to survive.

However, moral quandaries and conversations about faith and sacrifice can only carry a film so far, especially since there isn't much room for character development due to the enormous cast. The life-or-death scenario is intriguing, but after more than two hours, it starts to drag a little in a film that might use a more focused editing. There's just so much that Michael Giacchino's diligent, usually powerful orchestral score and Pedro Luque's aggressive camerawork can do to maintain the momentum.

As the group's chances of surviving diminish, Numa notes in voiceover that "What was once unthinkable has become routine"—removing meat from human bones. Though there are some amusing instances of ingenuity, such as making a sleeping bag for the hikers out of insulation material cut from the wreck, in a way that's what happens to the film overall.

When Nando and Roberto come upon a horseman, Bayona skillfully brings the film out of a dramatic stasis and speeds up the action as the surviving survivors are saved and reunited with their family back home.

The awful experience of having to devour friends, relatives, and teammates in order to survive, the tortured journey back to safety, and the psychological uneasiness of being heralded as "Heroes of the Andes" by the media all have a profound impact. These events resonate more than the weeks of suspense between life and death. The somber image of the thin survivors—rather than the emotional hugs from girlfriends, family, and friends—provides the final burst of heartbreaking sadness. Their skin, cracked by the intense heat and caked in filth from months of exposure, appears to be a sharp criticism of many who have referred to their rescue as a miracle.