Society of the Snow wasn’t a hard movie to make affecting. It’s subject matter is so easily empathetic. The 1972 Andes disaster, in which a plane travelling from Montevideo, Uruguay to Santiago, Chile crashed in the middle of the Andes leaving a stranded team of rugby players to survive on their own in critically dire circumstances for over two months, is one of the most compelling true-life disaster stories of the twentieth century. Sensationalized for a time given the publicized cannibalism the survivors had to resort to to stay alive, the story has nonetheless retained significant power of fascination and inspiration. Often working with some of the survivors, it has been retold in several books and one halfway forgotten Hollywood movie from 1993, but Society of the Snow is the first adaptation made in South America, featuring a cast composed of many Uruguayan actors speaking the same language that the characters they play did.
The movie is nominated for a Best International Feature Oscar for Spain though, which provided most of the money and director J.A. Bayona off a successful(?) run of movies in the U.S. Bayona proves a good fit for the subject matter though, having begun his career with a similar hope-in-the-face-of-death disaster film The Impossible, coupled with a pedigree in horror that fuels the dark and grisly sides of the story. Though on this, implication is the tool more often used than depiction -and it is more than enough to relate discomfort.
For the most part, Bayona is pretty smart with how he does this. The crash itself is a good example, as he magnifies the intensity when things start to go harry, then honing in on the wings shearing off, the sounds of bones breaking in legs as seats are flung together. It's shot with both clarity and a sharply edited chaos, and the attention to detail in how such a plane would break up renders it especially harrowing. Moreover, Bayona and the actors articulate very well the direness over the first few days of survival, as more people die, the supplies run short, improvisations to the fuselage are made to keep out the fatal cold, and word of the rescue operation being called off reaches them. The film incorporates text on occasion highlighting what day it is, but it's honestly not needed. The scale and longevity of the situation is communicated pretty potently without.
Much of the cast of this movie was made up of apparently first-time actors -it is shocking how fantastic they all are, given how strongly they convey the extremities of their experiences. Of particular note are MatÃas Recalt as Roberto Canessa -depicted as an underdog of the team who eventually plays a principal role in getting them rescued; and Enzo Vogrincic as Numa Turcatti, who is critically injured in the initial crash and spends a lot of the movie contemplating his fate. But though characters like these and Nando Parrado (AgustÃn Pardella) have more conventional heroic narratives by virtue simply of their roles in the real story, most of the team and survivors are spotlighted for what they went through, what they overcame. According to Bayona, this was the first adaptation of the story in which all of the remaining survivors agreed to use of their real names. All of them were apparently shown it too, and one, Carlos Páez, even appears in the film as his own father.
That great amount of affection for these men is palpable in the movie, which deals sensitively with things such as the excruciatingly hard decision to turn to cannibalism, the religious debate around it (all of the boys being staunch Catholics), and the other exceedingly difficult realities of being stranded in one of the most inhospitable places on earth. The long trek for a radio in the wreckage of the back half of the plane several kilometres away, an avalanche that all of a sudden buries the fuselage again killing a few more survivors. Through it all, Bayona keeps the characters’ humanity front and centre, making their endurance resonate that much more strongly. These aren’t just heroes motivated by an overwhelming desire to stay alive, they are mostly mere boys -young teens or in their early twenties facing cold like they’ve never seen and forced to eat the bodies of their dead friends.
The immediacy of their plight is rendered strongly still through things like the wide shots that emphasize an emptiness of life and civilization, and the make-up that captures the wear on their bodies -parched lips and dirty, crusted skin, it often reminded me of the similar effects used through the desolate Mordor sequences of The Return of the King. Like that film, this one ultimately leads to two embarking out on their own in the hopes of saving their friends -and this last portion of the movie may be a little undercooked compared to what had come before -Bayona evidently more interested by the survival than the eventual rescue of the story.
But he remains faithful to that story, going so far as to recreate photographs associated with it and pull lines of dialogue both from the Pablo Vierci book the movie is based on and from the first-hand accounts of the survivors. It is that rare cinematic translation of a real event that doesn’t need any embellishment (beyond the mere condensing of time) to be rendered more engaging, and Bayona knows it as he keeps the film’s momentum high over nearly two and a half hours by giving equal time to humanist details and characterization (like the bond that is shaped between the boys) as he does to the narrative and psychological tenseness. There’s an aspect of this that reminds me a little of the 2022 All Quiet on the Western Front, just less unrelentingly bleak.
Indeed the movie ultimately sticks true to the hopeful life-affirming and celebratory theme of the end of this story. And it really lands that beat due to some vital choices of artistry by Bayona and a stirring score from Michael Giacchino. The drama is built effectively, the ending thoroughly earned. Society of the Snow is a harsh and gripping movie, but by its title (and final shot) it makes a point to also be about the people; the story as one belonging to them as a collective more than the world. It stresses with deep conviction what they went through, the pain in their losses, and the joy in their survival. And for as compellingly as their experiences are played, there’s no element of exploitation there. Bayona did the survivors of this disaster and the fallen justice -a good inspiring movie if ever there was one.
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