Society Of The Snow review: Another take on a harrowing true-life plane crash

It’s shocking that the crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 has inspired such lackluster adaptations of the harrowing affair, in which a rugby team and their friends and family are stranded in the snow-covered Andes mountains for 71 days. Survive!, a low-budget Mexican production from 1976, played up the exploitative schlock value which was popular in disaster flicks of the era. 1993’s formidable yet faulty Alive, from director Frank Marshall, used an American-heartthrob-cast and leaned heavily into melodrama and sensationalism. The latest take on the tragedy, Spanish director/co-writer J.A. Bayona’s Society Of The Snow, seeks to restore honor to those brave men and women who battled insurmountable odds.

Bayona is no stranger to capturing humanistic, grief-driven ordeals, having done so with gobs of grace in The Impossible. With Society Of The Snow, Bayona and screenwriters Bernat Vilaplana, Jaime Marques and Nicolás Casariego follow the map author Pablo Vierci has drawn as a guide, but the result is a film that focuses less on the characters’ individual psyches and more on the factual details from a compelling real-life human drama.

The story opens with narration from passenger/primary protagonist Numa (Enzo Vogrincic) ruminating on the effects that extreme trauma can have on people. As we see the Old Christians Club rugby team play in Montevideo, Uruguay, the filmmakers drop an obvious set-up for teamwork—one ripe for a third act callback with players Roberto (Matías Recalt) and Nando (Agustín Pardella). The squad has plans for a field trip to Santiago, Chile, where the students can play and pick up chicks with their friends, including law student Numa. However, for some this weekend getaway to let off steam before graduation and adulthood goes from a figurative last hurrah to a literal one.

During the flight, the fluid camera moves through the aisle capturing the young men relaxing, playing card games and chatting as the group’s de-facto documentarian Tintin (Agustín Della Corte) takes photos. One passenger jinxes it though, describing the mountains they’re traversing as a shark with the jagged terrain as its teeth and the climate trapping them like prey. Soon enough the cliffs narrow in, wings are sheared off, the plane splits in two, and the cabin and cockpit rapidly toboggan to its final resting place—with a fraction of the original passengers still alive. The survivors face freezing temperatures, religious crises, severely injured comrades, and a scant food supply as they try to figure out how to survive long enough to be rescued. But Mother Nature is cruel and she’s raging. A creeping death by starvation awaits.

Unlike previous iterations, Bayona and company don’t utilize manipulative techniques to conjure our tears. They earn them through their tribute to these survivors’ tests of endurance, strategy and belief. In their capable hands, the salacious dealings with cannibalism become more about exploring how the marooned people coped and persevered through their extraordinary and horrific circumstances. The filmmakers not only explore delicate facets of survivor’s guilt, but also the Catholic guilt felt by those who had to resort to such drastic measures. Among the cast, Vogrincic is a standout, never tipping into the narrative’s inherent maudlin underpinnings. He channels fear, sadness, pain and hope with aplomb.

On the aesthetic side, Pedro Luque Briozzo Scu’s cinematography augments the thematic and atmospheric pull, invoking lens flares, claustrophobic perspective distortion and a cold, bruising color palette to photograph the frostbitten, sunburned, skeletal bodies. Composer Michael Giacchino’s tender, contemplative score is used sparingly, resounding without being overbearing or obtuse. As characters face adversity, strings turn from soft in the stillness of mortality to discordant in the vastness of the wilderness, even incorporating a percussive beat to emphasize character drive and a choral section when obstacles comingle with spirituality.

That said, once isolated in the Andes, the survivors transform from individuals into a monolith with a distinct lack of defined characteristics for each person. Perhaps this is deliberate, to speak to the fact they had to work together, moving like a unit and putting personal egos aside. However, we yearn for greater delineation between them. When these individuals perish, we’re moved only by a general sense of compassion. Plus, there’s almost no room for levity in this oppressively punishing cycle of joy and despair, from which these players strive to break free.

While the majority of the film takes place between the wreck and the rescue, the film starts to become truly fascinating in the third act, when the survivors re-acclimate into society. The intense scrutiny and immense pressure they faced is sadly glossed over in this adaptation—even though Numa’s voice-over hauntingly and poetically muses “They were dead like us.” It begs for this biopic to continue to unfurl.

Society Of The Snow may be the best version of this saga told so far. Still, it feels incomplete and doesn’t dig deeper even as it hints at greater pathos beneath the surface. Certainly no one but those who endured what happened on that mountain can truly grasp it. But with time, empathy and a talented filmmaker, perhaps the full scope of the tale will eventually be told.

Society Of The Snow streams on Netflix starting January 4