Society of the Snow (2023)

I was pretty irritated when I first saw this film advertised a couple of months ago. This wasn't based on anything other than the fact that I saw Frank Marshall's version of this remarkable story, Alive (1993) several years ago and through it was rather impressive, so did we really need yet another retelling?

Well, as it turns out, Society of the Snow did annoy me, but only in the sense that I didn't catch it in 2023, meaning that it missed out on my Top Ten Films of the year list which it would have undoubtedly graced.

J. A Bayona's filmography is baffling to say the least. He seems well prepped to helm this sort of true life disaster movie following The Impossible (2012), but his follow up to that was his own disaster - the insipid Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018), making it anyone's guess as to what his next move would be.

His choice is another retelling of the truly astonishing (and I mean truly astonishing) real life tale of the crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 in the Andes mountains in 1972, and what came after, following the halt of rescue attempts (somewhat understandably) assuming everyone on board had perished.

If you don't know the story you haven't been paying attention, but I'll do my best to avoid any spoilers, if indeed there can be any over fifty years on. The bulk of the passengers were made up by a Uruguayan rugby team, and they made up the majority of the crash survivors and that's more or less where Bayona takes up the story.

The early scenes are where the film is at its weakest; it's obvious Bayona is keen to get to the mountains and tell the survival story but this comes at the slight expense of initial emotional attachment. We're rushed swiftly through character introductions that will become key to proceedings later on, and although this isn't a problem that lasts long, as the plane is flying over the mountains there's little to feel beyond snippets of questions of "which ones that again?" "Have we been introduced to him?"

That's more or less where the quibbles end. The crash itself is spectacularly horrific and captured in a way that is chillingly realistic, and from then until the end Pedro Luque's cinematography is breathtakingly beautiful, despite further scenes of deeply unsettling content.

There's no doubting that Society of the Snow is grim: it's one of the most brutal films I've seen in recent years, and the plausibility Bayona and the actors bring is awe inspiring- one sequence in particular when the broken part of the plane they're sleeping in is engulfed by an avalanche and buried, is utterly horrific.

When it comes to the inevitable (and infamous) stage of survival where they're contemplating eating the dead, religion (most of the passengers were Catholic) comes to the forefront. Is it immoral to eat the dead to survive? How can these people still have their faith in God? The answer to the second question is easier to answer: without their faith, what have they got left? And there's something strangely communion like about the human flesh when the time comes for those with initial doubts; without it, they're going to die. In some ways it is God's body and blood.

Michael Giacchino's haunting yet delicate score offers an emotional inroad, but it's never overstated; it simmers at the edges without over-spilling and becoming the forefront of proceedings, frequently accompanied by a gentle voice-over from one of the survivors, Numa. This is an interesting approach by Bayona, and although not a completely successful one, it justifies its existence by the film's finale. If you've not seen Alive this is a must see, and if you have seen Alive it's no less of a must see. It's a shame it hasn't got a huge theatrical release, but by the same token of course, without Netflix we may have never got it at all. I know the story inside out and was confident that I knew it well enough to sideline any potential emotional outbursts, but this foolish notion was wrecked by Bayona's film, one that stretches to two and half hours and simply doesn't let up. Despite knowing the facts, I still questioned what was happening in front of me. There is almost no way that this story really took place, and the fact that it did is beyond astounding; that Bayona still has your teeth ripping out your fingernails during it means he's produced something of serious worth here. 8.2/10