‘Society of the Snow’ Review: J.A. Bayona Recreates Horrifying Survival Experience of the 1972 Plane Crash With Excruciating Detail
If you were worried 2012’s The Impossible was too cute for its own good, director J.A. Bayona has got you covered. With his latest post-disaster movie Society of the Snow (La Sociedad de la Nieve), the Spanish-born filmmaker examines up close the lengths humans are willing to go to for our survival and brings it home with a clear message: Hug your loved ones while you can. Also, make sure you bring warm clothes and a lot of food the next time you board a plane.
Set in 1972, the film depicts with excruciating detail the 72 days that followed the crash of a plane in the Andes while it was carrying 45 players of a rugby team and their companions. Only 29 of them survived the crash, and their numbers went down as the days and weeks went by, forcing the remaining passengers to make hard decisions and face the possibility that they might not get rescued after all. No matter what, though, hope survived.
Rather than a cautionary tale, which would have been too simple and too arrogant, or a retelling of heroic acts of survival, Society of the Snow is focused on putting the audience inside that snowy mountain with our protagonists, to make us feel the weight of their decisions and ask not to judge by saying “What would you have done?” Bayona isn’t even interested in showing us what is happening outside of the hill where the plane crashed, nor does he care about the backstory of each of our players. Because they are not interested in that.
The first night was the hardest one. None of them were prepared for the record-low temperatures that could be reached there, and they hadn’t had enough time to recover from the shock of having lost some of their friends, let alone the fact that they were alone in the middle of nowhere. Plus, many of them were not even in the recovery phase from their injuries. If someone falls asleep, they will freeze to death. That’s no exaggeration, it is a literal fact, as Enzo Vogrincic’s voice-over notes, and they all realize during the morning. Oh, but the sun had never shined brighter in their eyes than that morning.
That’s when part of the reality of the dire situation they were in started to sink in, at least for the ones who weren’t suffering major injuries. Can a search party find them? And what happens if they don’t? That is the key question they will have to answer sooner rather than later, as a few days later they find out that no one is looking for them anymore. As they realize once they climb halfway to the mountain trying to get to the other half of the plane, their debris is not even noticeable looking just two miles up the hill, let alone from a plane flying over them.
The human body can spend three days without drinking water and three weeks without eating. But can they survive that long? At their altitude and as they try not to freeze off, they are consuming a lot more calories every day than the average human, and soon they will have to start to make hard decisions and think about the dead bodies they have lying on the snow. Will they be able to break their moral code and eat human flesh to survive?
You can probably imagine the answer, given the historical context, but let me add even more to it. Bayona is obsessed with putting us in the perspective of the survivors, who task the hard part of choosing and cutting the bodies into pieces to only two of them. That means that we don’t see the transgression, but we certainly see the results. Do they enjoy it? No more than we do watching it, but it’s what we have to do to keep going and find out how they get out of this one.
In terms of structure and the sense of fulfillment and satisfaction that the final few minutes of the film bring, Society of the Snow is quite similar to last November’s Nyad, and though the Annette Bening-led film was a lot easier to watch, Bayona’s survival story is a lot more impactful. We are all here for those final 20 minutes when our “heroes” (they don’t see themselves as that, as Vogrincic repeatedly tells us) finally leave the mountain — I will refrain from giving specifics, even if this is a well-documented story by now and the point of the film is not to keep secrets.
LA SOCIEDAD DE LA NIEVE (L to R) ENZO VOGRINCIC as NUMA in LA SOCIEDAD DE LA NIEVE. Cr. QUIM VIVES/NETFLIX © 2022
Bayona is careful enough to honor those who fell along the way while still keeping the focus on those who lived to tell the story. It’s no easy watch, and quite honestly the scene of the plane crash at the beginning is one of the most horrifying sequences in any recent film. But it’s also forcing us to reflect on our own lives and the mundane problems we often get so worked up about. Was that argument with a friend worth it? What wouldn’t you give to see your partner’s face one more time? To talk with your parents once again. None of this factors into the story, yet they are questions that Bayona inevitably forces us to ask ourselves.
Perhaps the biggest triumph of Society of the Snow is how it never felt repetitive. A lot happened to these people in those two months, yet nothing really happened. That could have gone one of two ways really easily, but Bayona’s direction, along with the script he co-wrote with Bernat Vilaplana, Jaime Marques-Olearraga, and Nicolás Casariego (based on the novel of the same name by Pablo Vierci) always feels like its reinventing itself. Just like the people from the plane, the writing tries its best to find a reason to keep going, highlighting key events that made them lose hope before it eventually pivots to a ray of sunshine that flips it on its head. Once you’re able to surpass a certain point in the runtime, the rest seems to be even an easy watch.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the film’s most valuable asset: the cinematography by Pedro Luque Briozzo Scu. Snowy mountains have never looked more terrifyingly beautiful while feeling beautifully terrifying. There aren’t a lot of colors for him to choose from in the palette used in the film, but the use of natural sunlight and the depiction of some specific landscapes is simply indescribable. That alone may be a reason to watch the film. The other one? At least we know some of them will be OK.
Society of the Snow will be streaming on Netflix on January 4, after a limited theatrical release in December 2023.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
