Society of the Snow

 J. A. Bayona's Society of the Snow is a two-hour twenty minute film, shot documentary-style, about an airplane crash in the Andes in 1972.  The victims of the crash, mostly young men who were team members of a Uruguayan rugby club, were trapped on a glacier for about two months and had to resort to cannibalism to survive.  This is harrowing subject matter and the film is something of a slog.  Edgar Alan Poe, in prefatory remarks to his short story "The Premature Burial", observed that there were certain historical events in which interest is "all-absorbing" but that are too horrible to be represented in literary fiction -- his examples include the earthquake in Lisbon, the passage of the Berezina, the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre and the stifling of the prisoners in Calcutta's Black Hole.  I suppose it would be valid to include the story of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 in this list.  The movie is very good, tactful and restrained given its subject, but most of the characters in the show die, and die horribly, and so you have been forewarned.  

The movie is nothing if not business-like.  A couple of chaotic close-up shots on a rugby field  in Uruguay establish the situation and, then, we see the characters planning a holiday in Santiago -- they have apparently chartered a plane to fly them over the Andes to Chile.  There's some cheerful banter, a church service, and farewells at the airport, then, the protagonists are up and aloft for their fatal flight.  Bayona doesn't bother to establish the characters of his movie, more than half of whom will end up dead anyway in the first half-hour.  (It's probably significant that the rugby team is called "The Old Christians.")  The viewer can't keep track of the young man, although they are scrupulously named, but, as the film progresses, some of them become sufficiently salient to be identifiable to the viewer.  The movie isn't really a study in character; the extreme exigencies of the plight of the aircrash victims flattens them all into the mold of either survivor, all of more or less equal in desperation, or one of the dead.  There is a cunning trick played on the audience with respect to a voice-over narrator who identifies his team members and plane-mates when they are killed and, now and then, interjects some commentary to the events.  Toward the end of the film, the quasi-poetic voice-over from Numa, the 25-year old narrator, has a whispered, lyrical quality like the soft voices that sometimes underlie scenes in movies by Terrance Malick (for instance, The Thin Red Line) although Bayona is less philosophical and more pragmatic in the way he uses Numa's narration.  

Bayona's breakthrough film (he was previously a director of Spanish horror movies) was 2010's The Impossible, also an impressive if almost unbearably grim movie about the tsunami that ravaged Indonesia.  In that movie, there is about twenty minutes of exposition, a spectacular scene involving the tsunami, and, then, another ninety minutes of harrowing and gruesome narrative about surviving in the aftermath of the catastrophe.  The Society of the Snow is constructed in the same way.  After some business-like and efficient scenes establishing the situation, there is an impressive plane crash sequence, complete with shots of the plane ripping itself open on rocks, people being sucked out of the torn fuselage, and bones being broken like toothpicks in big close-ups.  After a blackout, the protagonists find themselves half-buried in the snow, about fifteen people dead or dying.  (Whenever someone dies in this movie, that person's name is shown on the screen in a title simulating the typing on an official report.)  After a horrendous night in the smashed fuselage, the survivors drag the dead out of the plane, tend to the wounded, and wait to be rescued.  But no one comes.  When a group of young men walk up the snowfield toward a ridge a thousand feet above the crash, they discover to their horror that the smashed fuselage blends into the glacier and can't be seen.  The plane has crashed in a snow-covered valley beneath high peaks and the area is totally desolate -- there aren't even any birds frequenting this glacial wilderness.  Later, the survivors set up a radio using batteries salvaged from the plane and learn that efforts to find them have been suspended due to bad weather and the fact that no one ever survives a crash of this sort in the Andes. After about ten days, the protagonists, after much debate and soul-searching, agree to eat the frozen corpses of the dead -- the bodies are apparently cut apart using broken glass by two cousins, the Strauch boys.  This happens off-screen and the characters are shown eating little pellets ofwhitish pink meat.  Things improve enough that the survivors expect that they will be rescued when the thaw occurs -- the crash occurred in the third week of October and, in the southern hemisphere, the young men think the snow will soften and melt in the third week of November.  The folks in the plane fuselage are telling jokes and making rhymes when an avalanche buries them.  This leads to more horrific episodes of characters suffocating in the snow.  No sooner do the survivors dig themselves out from this catastrophe than another avalanche buries them again.  These calamities result in about a dozen more casualties.  Numa, who emerges as the most dominant character in the film, has been training with a couple other young men for a long hike down out of the mountains.  The boys try to escape from the valley but the first night outside proves too cold for them.  Apparently, there are a enormous differentials between day and night time temperatures -- at one point, someone says that the t temperature drops 80 degrees when the sun goes down.  (This explains why the survivors can roll around in the snow during daytime without getting frost bite.)  Numa and a couple others finds the tail of the plane in which there are more suitcases, boxes of cigarettes (everyone smokes) and even a little food.  The team members planning to hike down into the inhabited part of Chile sew together some rain-proof insulation to make a sort of communal sleeping bag for use at night.  They set forth again but Numa, who has an infected leg wound, can't make the march and he limps back to the main shelter in the plane's fuselage.  Some more kids die due to inanition and wounds that have become suppurating abscesses.  The two member rescue party, with great effort, reaches a ridge but finds that their valley is surrounded by miles of white, mountainous terrain.  Nonetheless, they forge ahead, sustaining themselves on rotting human flesh.  By this time, they are sick and vomiting from the foul meat.  However, they reach a green valley and, while trying to catch a reptile for a meal, are discovered.  The surviving team members are rescued by helicopter.  We see nurses bathing skeletal men covered in unhealed wounds.  The ordeal lasted 72 days.  Sixteen of the 46 people on the plane survived the crash and their travails on the glacier.  Bayona, who is committed to naming names, lists them all as they are rescued.  The story of the so-called "Miracle of the Andes" has been told in a half-dozen books, an opera, and another half-dozen movies.  

The film is shot in very tight close-ups interspersed with long shots of the desolate mountains in which the fuselage, itself, appears as a mere speck in the white gorge among the peaks.  The method of direction doesn't call attention to itself except in the showy sequence of the crash and this is so frightening that the viewer doesn't have time to think about what is happening.  The picture is matter-of-fact and immersive and the acting seems to me impeccable.  Those who survive the ordeal remain alive due to luck.  There's really little or no heroism involved -- it's just a matter of some making it and others dying.  (In one scene, after the avalanche, a man says that he had to step on his wife buried below him to push himself up out of the snow -- she perished and he survives.)  The kids on the plain aren't particularly ingenious and there's no Robinson Crusoe flavor to the film -- the situation is so nightmarish that there's really nothing anyone can do but huddle together in the shattered plane and eat little candy-bar sized chunks of human flesh.  In one moving sequence, one of the kids who has hiked to safety, carefully buries his little parcel of meat near a stream, crossing himself and saying a prayer.  

You can't really like a movie of this sort.  It's well-observed, masterfully made, and harrowing.  If you like this sort of thing (grim survival films), it's well-done.  But if my plot summary above troubles you, stay away from this movie.  Your interest may be as Poe said "all absorbing" with respect to the horrific details but a movie like this doesn't really make you a better person -- the subject matter is so remote from ordinary experience that it's hard to evaluate and, although I thought the picture was gripping, I was happy when the film was over.