"Society of the Snow"

   ☆☆☆ 

The first time this story was made into a mainstream film, in 1976, Paramount crudely dubbed and quickly released a low-budget exploitation flick called Survive! that inexplicably opened at No. 1 at the box office. Then, 30 years ago (astonishing in itself) came Frank Marshall's Alive, which was given a big-budget Hollywood sheen by, of all studios, Disney.

Now comes Society of the Snow (original title: La Sociedad de la Nieve), which both strips away the big-budget gloss despite having a big budget financed by the biggest of the modern versions of studios, Netflix, but that remains dogged by the core problem telling this story will always have.

The story is that of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, which was carrying 45 people, mostly a rugby team and their friends and families, when it crashed high in the Andes Mountains. When two survivors finally made it to safety after a harrowing 10-day trek, 14 more young men were found alive—72 days after the initial crash. To survive those two months in the barren, snow-covered and storm-tossed mountains, they had to resort to cannibalism.

Almost every other aspect of their incredible, unbelievable experience pales next to the discussion of cannibalism. The survivors didn't even want to tell the world what they had done, knowing that it would become the only part of the story anyone wanted to know about. And so it remains.

From that first shlock movie to Frank Marshall's film this one, directed by J.A. Bayona, whose The Impossible and A Monster Calls each were harrowing in different ways, "they had to eat the bodies of the dead passengers" is the immutable fact at the core of the story. It is sort of shameful to admit it; it is not something we are supposed to want to know about. But it is there. And no filmmaker has ever been able to get past it; Bayona is no exception.

Society of the Snow is the first film to cast Uruguyan and Argentinean performers in the leading roles, almost all of whom are newcomers, which further adds to the film's significant challenges. The screenplay doesn't take time to help us get to know them before they take off in the plane, so in the confusion of the wreckage, all the actors seem interchangeable. With a cast this large, it's imperative to give us the time to know who the characters are, but none of the young men (or the few women who initially survive) become much more than stoic cyphers, often wracked with guilt over their actions.

Adding to the confusion over who's who is the film's incessant use of close-ups, which might work much better on a home screen than on the big screen. None of that can take away from the impressive, often grueling, physicality of the film. Society of the Snow is in every way well-made and constructed. But with not much differentiation between characters and even less in the setting—snow becomes hard to make interesting after a while—the movie has a hard time investing its audience emotionally. It comes down to wanting to know if they really did do that in order to survive.

Yes, they did. And since this is an oft-told story, Society of the Snow should be about a lot more than that. In its final few minutes, the film manages becomes more thoughtful and profound, but this story and the real people behind it may never overcome the shock factor of what they did to make it through those inconceivable 72 days.

Viewed December 27, 2023 — Laemmle NoHo 7

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