Society of the Snow: Getting Past Survival and Hunger to Know Life

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Movie info via Rotten Tomatoes:

In 1972, Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, which had been chartered to fly a rugby team to Chile, crashed in the heart of the Andes. Only 29 of its 45 passengers survived the accident. Trapped in one of the most hostile and inaccessible environments on the planet, they have to resort to extreme measures to stay alive.

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Review:

The Castilian born J.A. Bayona has rescued the Old Christians rugby team from the sensationalized maw of its Hollywood history. The survivors not only had to live through the societal stigma for their resorting to anthropophagy (as opposed to cannibalism, which involves active hunting and eating of humans) but the bad movie made of their survival story, 1993’s Survive! That mess had a mostly gringo cast (with Ethan Hawke in his feature debut) who stayed consistently well tanned, sculpted and fashion magazine stylish and expensively clothed.

Society of the Snow strives for authenticity. Instead of American actors and fashion icons there is a mostly Uruguayan cast and shabby period styles that looked salvaged from period thrift stores. Authentic accents. Authentic folks. The mountain scenes mingle location shots from the actual Andes with the main set located in the Sierra Nevadas of Spain. Instead of a poetic and shlock voice narration, an authentic one, featuring the old wavering voices of the real survivors would have added a more emotional gut punch. A small point.

For a horror-action vet like Bayona the crash is the easy part of the story. It is a visceral masterpiece featuring a soundtrack full of rattling metal and enough impaling and body and bone snapping and squishing to keep his horror fans entertained. It’s all shot in vertiginous closeup.

As for the flesh eating, Bayona keeps it discrete and distant. It’s treated as more of an aside, never really seen or emphasized— chicken wing eating moments, that come and go rather quickly. The survival, endurance, the faith needed is what Bayona is interested in- the characters and human element.

Society of the Snow is for the most part a gripping and emotional watch. It gets a 3.5/5 or a B+ and is streaming on Netflix.

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Credits:

Directed by

J. A. Bayona

Screenplay by

• J. A. Bayona
  • Bernat Vilaplana
  • Jaime Marques
  • Nicolás Casariego

Based on

La sociedad de la nieve

by Pablo Vierci

Produced by

• Belén Atienza
  • Sandra Hermida
  • J. A. Bayona

Starring

• Enzo Vogrincic Roldán
• Matías Recalt
• Agustín Pardella
• Felipe González Otaño
• Luciano Chatton
• Valentino Alonso
• Francisco Romero
• Agustín Berruti
• Andy Pruss
• Simón Hempe
• Juan Caruso
• Esteban Bigliardi
• Rocco Posca
• Esteban Kukuriczka
• Rafael Federman
  • Agustín Della Corte
  • Tomas Wolf

Cinematography

Pedro Luque

Edited by

Jaume Martí

Music by

Michael Giacchino[1]

Production

companies

• Misión de Audaces Films
• El Arriero Films
• Netflix

Distributed by

Netflix

Release dates

• 9 September 2023(Venice)
• 13 December 2023(Uruguay)
• 15 December 2023(Spain)

Running time

144 minutes

Countries

• Spain
• Uruguay
• Chile[2]

Language

Spanish

Budget

€60 million

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