As time marches on, the boundaries of what we consider “distasteful,” societally, shifts and changes. What once was scandalous now feels incredibly quaint, leaving few subjects that still feel like they contain an element of danger, which means that a certain brand of allure has slowly died off. If there’s anything safe from reappraisal and societal acceptance, it’s probably cannibalism; though we love everything from Yellowjackets to Silence of the Lambs, from Julia Ducournau’s Raw to real-life stories about the Donner Party, you’re still going to find people who simply cannot engage with the subject, or simply dismiss any media about the subject.
Society of the Snow, the new film by J.A. Bayona, returns the Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and The Orphanage director to the world of dramatized tragedy. 2012’s The Impossible used Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor and Tom Holland to put us inside the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, while Society takes us from Thailand to the Andes in 1972, where an inexperienced pilot crashed a plane caring 45 people, including 19 members of a Uruguayan rugby team. Doesn’t waste any time building up to the crash — happens around the 15-minute mark, leaving us more than two hours to capture the horrors faced by the 33 people who survived the crash, and especially the 16 that miraculously saw rescue 72 days later.
If the opening paragraph didn’t tip you off, the “how” of their survival is a huge component of why the story of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 was worth documenting. “This is a place where living is impossible. Where the only thing that doesn’t belong is us,” we hear in voiceover from one of the survivors not long after the plane crashes, as the stars illuminate the snowfield that they’d grow to call home. The film skips a few moments to remind us how small they are in their surroundings. At first, rescue feels like a possibility, but this quickly dissipates. One of the films’ only “that’s just too convenient!” moments comes in the form of a freshly found and fixed radio coming back to life just in time for a broadcast about how the search for their plane had been called off, just eight days into their time in the Andes. This is all it takes for the inevitable conversation about cannibalism to begin in earnest, and the survivors begin making peace with the horrors of their reality.
The film doesn’t sensationalize, but it sure loves hitting us with blow after blow. Every death comes with text on screen giving us their name and age, a potent reminder that every on-screen death we see represents someone who lost their lives on the mountain. The worst moment, by far, is a scene where the characters sit inside the plane’s husk and make up poetry. For a moment, you think, “Wow, they’ve got the hang of this!” Then, the denizens of the plane clock a strange rumbling punctuating the mountain silence, and BAM, they’re hit with an avalanche, causing yet more death and destruction. “Today is October 30th,” we hear in voiceover, and a chilling realization settles in: this happens roughly two weeks into their two months on the mountain. This sequence is among the most harrowing, as four days trapped beneath snow drives the survivors into a soul-darkening reckoning with their means of survival.
The care put into exploring that which helps the survivors soldier towards rescue is what sets Society apart from most cannibal fiction. “I have more faith now than I’ve ever had. But my faith… isn’t in your God,” says Arturo Nogueira, who would die in the mountains over a month in, “I believe in the God that Roberto has in his hands when he treats my wounds… I believe in Daniel’s hands when he cuts the meat, and Fito when he gives it to us without waying which of our friends it belonged to, so we can eat it without having to remember the life in their eyes. I believe in that God.” This speech is sobering, but it hammers home the heaviness of the decisions each survivor made to survive the Andes.
Of course, we wouldn’t feel any of it all had Society of the Snow not fixed the biggest issue with The Impossible: the fact that it’s difficult to put yourself in the shoes of the survivor of a catastrophe when they’re an A-list celebrity. Society was filmed partially at the actual crash site, using a cast packed with relative unknowns and people minor enough to not even have headshots on IMDb, making it easy to get lost in how real everything feels. When a survivor dies, we ache. When someone is pushed into eating someone else, you can feel their desperation. Nobody here is reinventing the wheel acting-wise, but that’s almost what truly sells the brutal realism of Society: if you didn’t know any better, you’d almost believe we were watching it all really happening.
Much like the players, the look and feel of the film is far from revelatory, but it’s no less integral to the film’s success. Bayona and cinematographer Pedro Luque channel their inner Terrence Malick in capturing their environments, bringing an incredible amount of intimacy to the desolation that we grapple with for more than two hours. There’s also a surprising emphasis put on just how beautiful their surroundings really are; shots of snowdrifts coming off the mountain peaks around them punctuate the film, and each of them feels awe-inspiring — while also underscoring just how out there our survivors are. Don’t be surprised if you aren’t reduced to tears when the rescue helicopters buzz overhead at the crash site.
Beyond the human drama and the beautiful scenery and the dedication to recreating the harrowing conditions faced by the crash survivors lies one thought: “Why did Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom suck so much?” Though Society of the Snow is not a perfect film, it’s hard to ignore the difference in quality between these two films — one a bloated and hideous CGI schlock-fest with a characteristically bland Chris Pratt, the other a grounded, harrowing and technically dazzling portrait of tragedy and disaster. Society is the work of someone passionate enough that every brutal minute of the film feels like it was made with immense care and respect, which elevates the film beyond the depths of lurid melodrama into something painfully human.
Photo courtesy of Netflix
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