The Transcendent Society of the Snow Has Existential Bite

In Society of the Snow, staying alive is a horror. The action sequences in director J. A. Bayona’s adaptation of La Sociedad de Nieve, Pablo Vierci’s book about the 1972 crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 in the Andes Mountains, are vivid, even lurid. The sounds of bones crunching and hot blood hissing onto white snow; the claustrophobia of being buried in an avalanche in real time; a pallid, emaciated hand reaching into a pile of bones to pick the last meat off a friend’s ribs. Society of the Snow often tests our understanding of the human body and the inherent dignity we assume it’s owed. What elevates the film above trauma-porn gore and pushes it into transcendence, though, is how its philosophical script and unshakeable performances navigate the question of whether survival is a transgression against God. Not since Martin Scorsese’s Silence has a film so effectively asked us to consider whether faith is benevolence or a blight.

Society of the Snow (now on Netflix) is divided into a before and an after. We meet the members of the Old Christians Club amateur rugby team from Montevideo, Uruguay — siblings, cousins, friends — who decide to charter a plane to a match in Chile. Narrator Numa, played by Enzo Vogrincic, only knows a few of them when he agrees to go. But the trip is positioned as a kind of youthful last hurrah; many of the team members are in their early 20s and moving onto jobs, relationships, and adulthood more generally; when they pose together in front of the plane for a photo, they’re vibrant, flush-cheeked and strong-bodied. The quotidian nature of air travel is a little too on the nose here, with Bayona cycling through teammates reassuring parents and lovers that the trip to Uruguay is nothing to worry about. That setup is undercut, though, by what happens after takeoff, and by how Bayona launches us, with cacophony and discord, into what unfolds after.

In one of many fantastic sequences that emphasize the indifference of the natural world to our existence, Bayona and cinematographer Pedro Luque place Flight 571 in an increasingly opaque vortex of wind and snow that the travelers (and we) don’t notice until Numa looks out a window and registers the inhospitality of their surroundings. Oriol Tarragó’s metallic sound design, rattling during the jarring turbulence, reminds us that in the worst conditions, a plane is little more than a tin can inviting gravity’s punishment. The group’s large size (the team, family members, and unaffiliated strangers on the chartered flight) means that not every character develops a significant arc before the plane is in the air. But the suddenness of their absence after the plane hits a mountain pass in the Andes makes every remaining individual that much more precious.

When the survivors of the crash begin trying to figure out how to stay alive, they admit their fears like they’re in confession. Should they stay at the crash site, although they hear on a radio that the rescue mission has stalled? Should they try to find the missing tail of the plane, although the journey requires trekking through feet of snow and scaling a mountain in decreasing sunlight? And, once they run out of food (after eating leather, cigarettes, and even their own scabs) should they turn to the bodies of the dead, although this would violate the tenets of their Catholicism? The film presents these discussions like a polite Roman assembly, with the meat-eating and abstaining factions each describing their rationale. Certain actors are given the opportunity to bring their characters into sharper focus, and they do so with heartbreaking vulnerability and exhaustion. Alongside Vogrincic, who withdraws Numa into ruminative introspection as he starves, Diego Vegezzi imbues the team’s captain, Marcelo, with a fatigued sense of responsibility, while Esteban Kukuriczka and Francisco Romero add calmness and affability to the Strauch cousins, who volunteer for the horrible task of butchering corpses once the group decides to start harvesting them for meat. The actors’ expressive faces and pained voices — “Will God forgive us?” “God has nothing to do with this” — communicate the toll on their souls, and the conversations go in unexpected directions. Cannibalism and organ donation don’t seem like a one-to-one comparison, but why should the rights of the dead outweigh the rights of the living? Society of the Snow doesn’t know the answers to these questions, so it doesn’t judge the survivors’ decisions. Instead, amid all this grotesquery, the film wisely focuses on the men’s friendship.

Bayona has spent his career painting different portraits of disaster. In The Orphanage and A Monster Calls, parents and children are severed from each other too soon through illness and accidents. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and its flood waters wipe out entire families in an instant in The Impossible. (There’s some poetic irony to how Society of the Snow, with its Spanish-speaking cast, serves as a more culturally accurate representation of this tragedy than Frank Marshall’s 1993 Ethan Hawke–starring version, Alive, when Bayona’s The Impossible did the exact same thing Alive did — reframing the Spanish survivors who inspired the film with English-language names and white Western actors.) Much of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is forgettable, but that image of a lone brachiosaurus silhouetted in the fiery explosions destroying John Hammond’s island is a nostalgia destroyer. Here, Society of the Snow finds a balance between the seemingly insurmountable obstacles of the survivors’ ordeal and the tenderness with which the men treat each other as the days pass into weeks and then months.

Certain moments convey this balance in isolation — the lonely image of a young man finding a shoe in the snow and quietly putting it back on his dead friend’s body — until an avalanche set piece late in the film puts this dichotomy into stark relief. After snow simultaneously buries the outside of the plane and floods the inside where the survivors had taken refuge, the film destaurates its color palette into sepia tones and switches to fish-eye lenses. The effect is a stifling nightmare that feels devoid of life — until the survivors start trying to dig themselves out without hurting anyone who is still submerged. The care the young men take here isn’t a counter to their past behavior, but a continuation of it: of how they cuddled together for warmth, gently fed each other bits of flesh, and respected each others’ decisions about what would happen to their bodies after they died. “Workers and students, hand in hand, we stand,” the team had declared before going on their tragic trip. Even as it questions the relationship between our corporeal containers and our religious identities, Society of the Snow honors that vow.