Society of the Snow tells the real-life story of Uruguayan Air Power Flight 571, a airplane that crashed into the Andes in 1972 and left its passengers, a rugby workforce and their supporters, ravenous and stranded for 72 days. It’s a grotesque story—the survivors ultimately resorted to cannibalism—that’s been dramatized many instances earlier than, most notably in 1993’s Alive, however the director J. A. Bayona’s rendition could be the most immersive take but. The crash scene is meticulously re-created—individuals being sucked out of the fuselage, bones shattering because the seats get ripped from the ground, our bodies crumpling towards the cockpit. A lot of the film takes place within the mountain vary’s blinding snow-covered slopes, the victims’ pores and skin bluish with frostbite, the sound of howling winds incessant. Nearly each shot highlights the frigid, terrifying actuality of what occurred.
As such, the movie is an often-nightmarish viewing expertise, however I couldn’t cease watching—and I wasn’t alone. Society of the Snow is, in accordance with Netflix’s in-house viewership information, the streamer’s first hit of 2024, changing into the most-watched movie on the platform in the course of the first week of January. It additionally occurs to be Spain’s submission for Greatest Worldwide Characteristic Movie on the Oscars and, given its presence on many technical classes’ shortlists, could possibly be a dark-horse contender for Greatest Image.
Harrowing survival dramas, even those who depict real-life occasions, are likely to do effectively with audiences. Catastrophe movies have carved out a wholesome presence on the field workplace, and intensely uncommon incidents—consider the Alaska Airways emergency-door debacle earlier this month—dominate headlines after they occur. However Society of the Snow isn’t simply exceptional for its huge attraction; as a movie that makes an attempt to honor its victims whereas concurrently providing graphic particulars, it each improves upon earlier iterations of the fabric and exposes the bounds of the story itself. The result’s a film that wrestles with its very existence—and, maybe, the existence of based-on-a-true-disaster tales.
To the movie’s credit score, its verisimilitude goes past the depiction of the crash. Based mostly on Pablo Vierci’s e-book of the identical identify, which drew from hours of interviews with survivors and their households, Society of the Snow makes an effort to respectfully painting the individuals concerned. The movie deploys a forged of South American actors, a pointed rebuke of the whitewashed, English-speaking ensemble of Hollywood stars featured in Alive. Victims’ names are proven on-screen, together with their ages, after scenes by which they perish. Pictures the passengers took in actual life are reproduced by the performers in sequences of them posing for footage, making an attempt to move the time. And the story is narrated by one of many crash survivors erased in Alive: Numa Turcatti (performed by Enzo Vogrincic), a legislation pupil invited to tag alongside on the journey.
But Numa’s voice-overs make for an odd addition. Within the last act of the movie—spoiler alert, although I’m undecided one is actually obligatory for an occasion that’s been chronicled in books, documentaries, and a stage play, and that even impressed the tv sequence Yellowjackets—Numa is revealed to be talking from past the grave, as the ultimate crash survivor to die earlier than the remainder of the group is rescued. It’s a selection that, although transferring, undercuts the movie’s uncooked realism. Making Numa the focus for a lot of the story signifies that the remainder of the ensemble don’t get the identical quantity of psychological shading as he does. Lots of the survivors turn into interchangeable, outlined not by their character however by their talent set, occupation, or the place they’re sitting inside their makeshift shelter.
On the identical time, nevertheless, Numa’s prominence helps illustrate the depth of the debates that adopted the crash and invitations viewers to contemplate their very own perspective. His religion saved him vehemently against desecrating the corpses, and that battle helps the movie keep rigidity in the course of the survivors’ arduous await rescue. For lengthy stretches of Society of the Snow, little occurs—at the least, nothing shocking for viewers who know going into the story in regards to the cannibalism. Numa’s demise, then, carries important narrative weight, even when it performs like a plot twist. In spite of everything, if the movie didn’t invent Numa’s ideas and heart him, what can be the purpose of dramatizing something? Why retell such brutal true tales?
That query of how a lot to manufacture or reimagine with out exploiting the individuals concerned haunts any movie a few real-life disaster, and Bayona is not any stranger to the conundrum. In 2012’s The Unattainable, which dramatized the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the director constructed visceral sequences of the destruction, then zoomed in on a single household of vacationers making an attempt to reunite amid the chaos—a transfer that drew criticism for the way in which it ignored the bigger ramifications of the disaster. In Society, Bayona instantly contends with the problem of balancing spectacle with sentiment; he ends the movie with Numa addressing the viewers in regards to the problem. “They don’t really feel like heroes,” Numa says of the survivors as a montage performs of them being cared for after their rescue. “As a result of they had been lifeless like us … They ask themselves, Why didn’t all of us get to come back again? What does all of it imply? You’ll want to search out out yourselves. As a result of the reply is in you. Preserve caring for one another. And inform everybody what we did on the mountain.”
The speech, although considerably on the nostril, encapsulates why Society of the Snow has turn into so standard: The story of Flight 571 is a tragedy and a miracle, each disturbing and provoking, grotesque and affirming. With out narrative interpretation, the crash is only a crash—one other accident in an extended historical past of aviation accidents. However as a result of there are survivors, every iteration has the chance to memorialize their struggling and their remembrances of victims, making what occurred really feel consequential. For viewers, such a sensation—of understanding there was a degree to those grueling occasions—could be a satisfying consolation.
