Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona plunges the audience into another memorably harrowing disaster based on a real-life tragedy, this time a plane crash in the Andes, in Society of the Snow (La sociedad de la nieve).
Almost as heart-stopping as his 2012 hit The Impossible with Naomi Watts and Ewan MacGregor battling for survival during the Indian Ocean tsunami, this Netflix production is a choral drama whose dozens of characters mostly never come to the fore, making the viewer’s emotional investment in them much more contained.
Still, the film’s recreation of a famous 1972 crash in the forbidding Andes mountains — the airliner was on its way to Chile with a Uruguayan rugby team aboard – is possibly the most frightening evocation of disaster in the air that anyone will ever want to see, or even experience vicariously in a movie. The terror is in the details, and just as The Impossible first showed the overwhelming power of nature to derail human lives in a matter of minutes, followed by accidents and after-shocks, so this film is packed with incident long after the small plane smashes to pieces against a mountain.
The accident happens half an hour into the film. A few moments of turbulence and the happy, carefree joking of the strong young men aboard comes to a standstill. Moments after a crew member tensely orders everyone to fasten their seatbelts, the plane seems to enter freefall. Numa (Enzo Vogrincic), a 24-year-old law student who joined the party at the last minute to make his brother happy, looks out of the small oval window seconds before they hit the mountain and the rear of the plane breaks off, sucking many passengers out the rear. Then it starts sliding through the deep snow amid screams of pain and terror.
For the 29 survivors, this is just the beginning of a life-or-death ordeal. In the two harrowing hours that follow the crash, they are subjected to blizzards and avalanches, extreme cold and extreme hunger, the death of family members and friends before their eyes. And yet, thanks to a superb editing job by Jaume Marti and Andrés Gil, the time flies by without lagging or superfluous scenes, while all hope of being rescued fades and anxiety builds.
Perhaps the most notorious aspect of the group’s survival was their collective decision, taken a week after they had finished the small amount of food on board, to eat the only source of protein available to them: the bodies of their dead fellow passengers, twelve of whom died on impact, others of injuries. Bayona and his screenwriters follow the story as told by survivors to author Pablo Vierci with delicacy and discretion, noting how repugnant it was to everyone, but also showing how it was inescapable if they were to remain alive.
Several people like Numa had religious objections and held out longer, but in the end there was no choice if they were to keep from starving. The small pieces of snow-covered human “finger food” they reluctantly chew and swallow seem like another test they have to pass, one in a seemingly unending series. After the second month post-crash, the winter snow begins to thaw and a small expedition party strikes out to cross the mountains on foot and look for help.
Turning terrible decisions like this into moving scenes between human beings pushed to extremes, enveloped in Michael Giacchino’s relentless score, Bayona steers away from dramatic clichés and the kind of senseless in-fighting that usually beleaguers such group dynamics onscreen. Given the conditions they were living through, there is surprisingly little argument and few raised voices, but much caring and compassion on display.
Several times, a suggestion is made that there is a meaning n the terrifying experience these unfortunate people are undergoing. The very beginning of the film raises the crucial question: was what happened a tragedy, or a miracle? This is, after all, the Old Christians rugby team and an early scene shows them in a packed church. “There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends,” one man writes before dying, quoting Jesus. Another man whose wife expired before she could be dug out of the snow claims to have learnt an almost mystical lesson of love for others. These subtle undercurrents do much to enrich a film that refuses to make easy heroes of the boys.
Pedro Luque’s cinematography emphasizes the contrast between the survivors – wounded, starving, freezing as temperatures drop to 30 degrees Celsius below zero at night – and the silent majesty of the snow-cloaked Andes which entrap them. The drama feels so visceral that small inconsistencies go basically unnoticed, like how a small pocket radio could pick up a signal in such a remote place, or why a number of the men appear clean shaven after weeks and weeks of living rough.
Though bereft of international names in the cast, Society of the Snow can nevertheless count on performances that are realistic and involving, even though only three or four characters emerge, for brief periods, from this starkly engrossing group drama.
Director: J.A. Bayona
Screenplay: J.A. Bayona, Bernat Vilaplana, Jaime Marques, Nicola?s Casariego based on a novel by Pablo Vierci
Cast: Enzo Vogrincic, Agustin Pardella, Matias Recalt, Esteban Bigliardi, Diego Vegezzi, Fernando Contigiani Garcia, Esteban Kukuriczka, Rafael Federman, Francisco Romero, Valentino Alonso, Tomas Wolf, Agustin Della Corte, Felipe Otano, Andy Pruss, Blas Polidori, Felipe Ramusio, Simo?n Hempe
Producers: Belén Atlenza, Sandra Hermida, J.A. Bayona
Cinematography: Pedro Luque
Editing: Jaume Marti, Andrés Gil
Production design: Alain Bainée
Costume design: Julio Suarez
Music: Michael Giacchino
Production companies: Netflix, Mision de Audaces
World Sales: Netflix
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Out of competition)
In Spanish
144 minutes
