The story of the 1972 Andes plane crash and its survivors has inspired many books and movies, even the TV series Yellowjackets. With Society of the Snow, J.A. Bayona adapts Pablo Vierci’s book of the same name to make something that’s close to the reality of the experiences endured by those aboard Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571. The aircraft was carrying 45 passengers and crew, including 19 members of the Old Christians Club rugby team, when it crashed in the Andes. Of those, only 16 would survive across an ordeal that lasted two months.
The crash itself is harrowingly portrayed at the start of the film, and with a minimum of buildup. The plane’s tail and wings are torn away on impact while the fuselage sails down the snowy mountainside like a sled. We catch flashes of the passengers’ limbs twisting and breaking, of metal shooting into flesh. The story moves quickly from there, with survivors swiftly depleting their supply of snacks. With nothing in the way of vegetation or wildlife, their only recourse is to eat from the bodies of the dead, which have been preserved by the very cold that makes any journey beyond their makeshift shelter in the wreckage seem impossible.
Such material lends itself to lurid exploitation, but the filmmakers approach the events with the utmost respect, primarily focusing on the spirit of cooperation among the characters. In this regard, the film isn’t interested in contriving artificial drama like 1993’s Alive, which depicts a pressure-cooker scenario among the survivors from the start, from individuals grumbling about who’s placed themselves in charge to others cracking under the pressure of their ordeal.
Society of the Snow, by contrast, pays little attention to matters of hierarchy, and while there’s debate over things like resorting to cannibalism, the collective resilience hardly ever splinters, and there’s pointed emphasis on everyone’s determination to persevere. By and large, the gravity of the situation is allowed to stand on its own: For one, where Alive invents not one but two perilous sequences where the characters dangle off of cliffs, Bayona’s film has none.
But Society of the Snow’s sense of reverence, which is evident in the captions that appear on screen marking when individuals have died, has its limits. The reluctance to linger on the gory details of the situation undermines some of the film’s potential power. Throughout, it’s almost as if the camera is wincing away from infected wounds and dead bodies. The most we see is thin strips of frozen flesh, and even when the characters are trapped by an avalanche and faced with an unobstructed, up-close view of their food source, Society of the Snow continues to suggest rather than explicitly depict cannibalism, always cutting away at just the right moment.
Elsewhere, the narration by Numa Turcatti (Enzo Vogrincic) attempts to fill in the blanks in the story, but his musings about what the survivors have “become” tend toward the overwrought and fail to complicate our feelings for even a moment. Throughout, the film foregrounds its words and the characters who deliver them, though there are far too many individuals on screen at any one time for anyone to emerge with a distinct personality. When some of them die, the film flashes to their carefree meeting at the airport before takeoff, lit in hopeful yellow hues.
Such flourishes are meant to emphasize a person’s humanity and the tragedy of their death, yet they more often feel like a hasty clarification of who’s who for our benefit. The hopeful monologues that pervade the film and exist to celebrate the triumph of the human spirit could just as easily come from one shivering, long-haired young man as another.
Bayona rarely lets his images speak for themselves, which is frustrating given his obvious gift for poetic, almost surreal succinctness. Society of the Snow’s early going in particular hauntingly captures the profound sense of fear and disorientation that grips the characters. In one scene, a young man is glimpsed hanging upside down, tangled in the wreckage and watching his blood seemingly drip upward. Another depicts the passage of time with a sudden cut from a screaming man who goes suddenly silent to a similar shot of the man, differently lit and now dead.
Such moments, though, are suffocated by the reverent focus on indistinct characters and explanatory narration. In its attempts to avoid exploitation, Society of the Snow overcorrects and, in the process, never dares to court our revulsion at what the survivors must do to live.
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This is a not a horror movie (although in some ways, it is). That’s why the focus is not on the survivors eating human flesh. Who wants to look at that anyway? If you want gore, there are other movies who can show you that. As a relative of someone who didn’t come back, would you want that depicted on screen? It’s done very respectully, which is the right way to go.