‘Society of the Snow’: A Real-Life Plane Crash, Cannibalism, and Miraculous Survival

Director J.A. Bayona is drawn to calamities and the unimaginable fortitude—and providence—required to survive them, and 11 years after he tackled those subjects with 2012’s The Impossible (and then, in far more fantastical terms, with 2018’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom), he revisits them with Society of the Snow, a dramatized account of the 1972 Andes flight disaster. Though now an oft-told tale (including by 1993’s Alive), Bayona’s latest feature finds new measures of beauty and horror amidst its wreckage, casting a haunting spell—at once horrific and hopeful, despairing and inspiring—that marks it as his finest film to date, and a fitting tribute to those who both perished and managed to escape their fateful mountain tomb.

“This is a place where life is impossible,” says Numa (Enzo Vogrincic Roldán), thereby underlining Society of the Snow’s (on Netflix Jan. 4) relationship to Bayona’s past work as well as bluntly summing up its environs: a cold, barren, snow-covered valley in the Andes Mountains where a plane heading from Uruguay to Chile carrying 40 passengers and five crew members, many of them male teenage members of the Old Christians Club rugby union team, went down in a crash on Oct. 13, 1972. As close to the middle of nowhere as any spot on the planet, it was a location almost preternaturally designed to never be found, and for 71 days, it wasn’t, forcing those who didn’t die during the initial accident to valiantly try to stay alive. As became immediately clear to all, that was an arduous task, given that they only had half the craft’s fuselage for shelter, minimal clothes to keep themselves warm (especially at night, when temperatures dropped upwards of 80 degrees), and scant rations to stave off starvation.

Altar boy Numa is the nominal protagonist of Society of the Snow as well as its narrator, although as written by Bayona, Bernat Vilaplana, Jaime Marques, and Nicolás Casariego (from Pablo Vierci’s book of the same name), the film boasts an ever-shifting focus, training its gaze on many different rugby players as they endeavor to grapple with their dire circumstances. Marcelo (Diego Vegezzi), the team leader, instinctively continues holding that position post-crash, keeping morale high and organizing their makeshift operation. Fito (Esteban Kukuriczka) is a pragmatist who, from the outset, is skeptical about a quick rescue. Roberto is clear-headed and determined, qualities that will serve him well as things go from bad to worse. They and numerous others, some known simply by their faces and others by their deeds, are cleanly drawn and never over-embellished, and the proceedings’ habit of moving freely among (and between) them comes across as a natural reflection of the fact that there was no one main character in this saga, merely a collection of individuals compelled to band together for themselves and each other.

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