Society of the Snow is an often-nightmarish—but wildly absorbing—viewing experience.
Society of the Snow tells the real-life story of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, a plane that crashed into the Andes in 1972 and left its passengers, a rugby team and their supporters, starving and stranded for 72 days. It’s a gruesome tale—the survivors eventually resorted to cannibalism—that’s been dramatized many times before, most notably in 1993’s Alive, but the director J. A. Bayona’s rendition may be the most immersive take yet. The crash scene is meticulously re-created—people being sucked out of the fuselage, bones shattering as the seats get ripped from the floor, bodies crumpling toward the cockpit. Most of the movie takes place in the mountain range’s blinding snow-covered slopes, the victims’ skin bluish with frostbite, the sound of howling winds incessant. Almost every shot highlights the frigid, terrifying reality of what happened.
As such, the film is an often-nightmarish viewing experience, but I couldn’t stop watching—and I wasn’t alone. Society of the Snow is, according to Netflix’s in-house viewership data, the streamer’s first hit of 2024, becoming the most-watched film on the platform during the first week of January. It also happens to be Spain’s submission for Best International Feature Film at the Oscars and, given its presence on many technical categories’ shortlists, could be a dark-horse contender for Best Picture.
Harrowing survival dramas, even those that depict real-life events, tend to do well with audiences. Disaster films have carved out a healthy presence at the box office, and extremely rare incidents—think of the Alaska Airlines emergency-door debacle earlier this month—dominate headlines when they happen. But Society of the Snow isn’t just remarkable for its wide appeal; as a film that attempts to honor its victims while simultaneously offering graphic details, it both improves upon previous iterations of the material and exposes the limits of the story itself. The result is a movie that wrestles with its very existence—and, perhaps, the existence of based-on-a-true-disaster tales.
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To the film’s credit, its verisimilitude goes beyond the depiction of the crash. Based on Pablo Vierci’s book of the same name, which drew from hours of interviews with survivors and their families, Society of the Snow makes an effort to respectfully portray the people involved. The film deploys a cast of South American actors, a pointed rebuke of the whitewashed, English-speaking ensemble of Hollywood stars featured in Alive. Victims’ names are shown on-screen, along with their ages, after scenes in which they perish. Photos the passengers took in real life are reproduced by the performers in sequences of them posing for pictures, trying to pass the time. And the story is narrated by one of the crash survivors erased in Alive: Numa Turcatti (played by Enzo Vogrincic), a law student invited to tag along on the trip.
Yet Numa’s voice-overs make for an odd addition. In the final act of the film—spoiler alert, though I’m not sure one is really necessary for an event that’s been chronicled in books, documentaries, and a stage play, and that even inspired the television series Yellowjackets—Numa is revealed to be speaking from beyond the grave, as the final crash survivor to die before the rest of the group is rescued. It’s a choice that, though moving, undercuts the film’s raw realism. Making Numa the focal point for much of the story means that the rest of the ensemble don’t get the same amount of psychological shading as he does. Many of the survivors become interchangeable, defined not by their personality but by their skill set, occupation, or where they’re sitting inside their makeshift shelter.
At the same time, however, Numa’s prominence helps illustrate the intensity of the debates that followed the crash and invites viewers to consider their own perspective. His faith kept him vehemently opposed to desecrating the corpses, and that struggle helps the film maintain tension during the survivors’ arduous wait for rescue. For long stretches of Society of the Snow, little happens—at least, nothing surprising for viewers who know going into the story about the cannibalism. Numa’s demise, then, carries essential narrative weight, even if it plays like a plot twist. After all, if the film didn’t invent Numa’s thoughts and center him, what would be the point of dramatizing anything? Why retell such brutal true stories?
That question of how much to fabricate or reimagine without exploiting the people involved haunts any film about a real-life catastrophe, and Bayona is no stranger to the conundrum. In 2012’s The Impossible, which dramatized the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the director constructed visceral sequences of the destruction, then zoomed in on a single family of tourists trying to reunite amid the chaos—a move that drew criticism for the way it ignored the larger ramifications of the crisis. In Society, Bayona directly contends with the challenge of balancing spectacle with sentiment; he ends the film with Numa addressing the audience about the issue. “They don’t feel like heroes,” Numa says of the survivors as a montage plays of them being cared for after their rescue. “Because they were dead like us … They ask themselves, Why didn’t we all get to come back? What does it all mean? You’ll need to find out yourselves. Because the answer is in you. Keep taking care of each other. And tell everyone what we did on the mountain.”
The speech, though somewhat on the nose, encapsulates why Society of the Snow has become so popular: The story of Flight 571 is a tragedy and a miracle, both disturbing and inspiring, gruesome and affirming. Without narrative interpretation, the crash is just a crash—another accident in a long history of aviation accidents. But because there are survivors, each iteration has the opportunity to memorialize their suffering and their remembrances of victims, making what happened feel consequential. For viewers, such a sensation—of knowing there was a point to these grueling events—can be a satisfying comfort.
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17.01.2024
Society of the Snow is an often-nightmarish—but wildly absorbing—viewing experience.
Society of the Snow tells the real-life story of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, a plane that crashed into the Andes in 1972 and left its passengers, a rugby team and their supporters, starving and stranded for 72 days. It’s a gruesome tale—the survivors eventually resorted to cannibalism—that’s been dramatized many times before, most notably in 1993’s Alive, but the director J. A. Bayona’s rendition may be the most immersive take yet. The crash scene is meticulously re-created—people being sucked out of the fuselage, bones shattering as the seats get ripped from the floor, bodies crumpling toward the cockpit. Most of the movie takes place in the mountain range’s blinding snow-covered slopes, the victims’ skin bluish with frostbite, the sound of howling winds incessant. Almost every shot highlights the frigid, terrifying reality of what happened.
As such, the film is an often-nightmarish viewing experience, but I couldn’t stop watching—and I wasn’t alone. Society of the Snow is, according to Netflix’s in-house viewership data, the streamer’s first hit of 2024, becoming the most-watched film on the platform during the first week of January. It also happens to be Spain’s submission for Best International Feature Film at the Oscars and, given its presence on many technical categories’ shortlists, could be a dark-horse contender for Best Picture.
Harrowing survival dramas, even those that depict real-life events, tend........
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