Society of the Snow (2024)

Score: 4 / 5

An extraordinary story, perhaps made more ordinary by its mass public circulation in various media, this dramatization of the Uruguayan crash in the Andes reminds us not only of the raw power of disaster storytelling but of the profoundly human crisis of man against nature. Movies like this don't come along often -- not ones based on real life, anyway -- and they are riddled with potential pitfalls. The emotional buildup, the disaster itself, efforts of survival that lead to more death, ramped-up melodrama, a brave action, and finally some heroic/tragic climax that leads to rescue or escape; it all starts to feel predetermined, a gimmick playing on our pathos. Not so in Society of the Snow, Spain's submission to the most recent Academy Awards, which follows the story with striking attention to the emotionality of existentialism.

After some introductory scenes of a Uruguayan rugby team on the field, the film gathers them together on a plane chartered to take them across the Andes Mountains to Santiago, Chile, for their next game. Accompanied by family, friends, and fans, the team mostly comprises twenty- and thirty-something-year-old men, all eager for their next big win. Note that their club name is the "Old Christians," a historical fact that research might reveal as integral to their personal ideologies but that this film immediately identifies, perhaps as a clue to its eventual impact. But their ill-fated trip is dramatized in highly spectacular fashion shortly after this rote introduction, and less than thirty minutes into the film, I was glued to my seat.

J.A. Bayona, in his typically visionary way, spectacularly dramatizes the infamous crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 in one of the most arresting and wrenching plane crashes I've ever seen on film. Since 9/11 especially, plane crashes have entered cinematic consciousness with increased horror (consider the differences in thrills between Air Force One and, for example, Flightplan or Red Eye), and even on television, as Lost so devastatingly demonstrated in 2004. Bayona's project climbs right up near the top of the list, perhaps only overshadowed by the impossibly intense United 93 from 2006. In a terrifying early climax, the plane is shoved too low by conflicting air pressure before it can summit a mountain pass, getting bisected by a rocky outcropping as its tail end free falls on one side of the range and its front half slides violently down a glacier on the other side. More than a dozen people were killed in the initial crash, including one who survived a free fall out the tail end but died from exposure in the deep snow and thin air.

Out of the original 45 people aboard, 16 would ultimately survive the entire ordeal, once they are rescued 72 days later. It's an astonishing story, one that in no small way requires heavy consideration of what constitutes a tragedy and what constitutes a miracle. Again, this is where the film's real interest -- at least for this viewer -- lies: somewhere between the tragic and the miraculous lies doubt and faith in tandem, something that forces us all into active participation as we witness the survivors attempting to continue surviving despite terrible odds. Not insurmountable odds, the film reminds us, as it is summer in the southern hemisphere at this time; as with most disaster films, this one blasts us with information about how the characters are both helped and hindered in their survival. So while they aren't as in danger of freezing as they would be in winter, and can even collect water from melting snow, they are also subject to problems like a late-in-film avalanche that comes out of nowhere and nearly buries them all.

With no climbing gear or even much weather-appropriate attire, the survivors of the initial crash have to resort to relatively primitive measures to stay alive, crafting makeshift splints and the like to tend to their injuries, urinating on each other for warmth, and gnawing on the leather of plane seats to try and absorb nutrients. When all else fails, they resort to eating the frozen corpses of those who had died. Of course, this cannibalism added a certain nasty sensationalism to the story, historically, and Bayona and his writers work hard to sidestep that, turning what could be a moment of graphic horror into something profoundly moving and even religious. The characters, mostly Catholic, explicitly compare the sacrifice of their fallen friends to the Eucharist, saying that God has indeed provided for them, and that greater love hath none than this.

It would be tempting -- and easy, in our current cinematic market -- to make this film a thrill ride, a disaster story of roller coaster proportions. It would be easy to center the film on a single survivor (such as one of the brave two who eventually hike off the mountain and find help after a week in the wild) and experience the whole ordeal through his limited perspective, immersing us in a man-over-nature narrative. But Bayona and his team avoid these methods and strive for something that honors the characters and honors the intelligence of his audience: he gives us an ensemble film that collectivizes the characters from a wide lens, making us care about them all equally and asking us to listen to all their perspectives in context of each other. So when some ideas are raised about various survival techniques, there is no obvious answer to us, just as there weren't to the real survivors; when someone dies, we feel a communal loss more than a heartstring-tugging attempt at heightened dramatics.

As a consequence, we don't really get to know many of the characters beyond their names and a few basic characteristics, frankly most of which escaped me by film's end. And while that will certainly bother some audiences, I actually found it liberating in a way, because these people weren't heroes. They were average athletes and fans and friends, some of whom resorted to heroic measures to survive, of course, but none of whom was singlehandedly meant to be a leader or savior. As much as the film tries to identify the characters by name via dialogue, more memorable are the lists of names of characters who have died, presented in onscreen text often along notations of how many days have elapsed since the crash. It's a study in the sublime, a strangely beautiful and haunting story that rings more true the more you consider yourself in the picture, awash in a wasteland of white, hoping for rescue when what is needed is an intentional effort of agency. God helps those who help themselves, no?