Netflix’s riveting survival drama Society of the Snow makes winter feel a whole lot colder

04.01.2024 - 18:24 / polygon.com

The story of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 has been told on-screen before, most notably in Frank Marshall’s 1993 movie Alive. But J.A. Bayona’s Netflix movie Society of the Snow revisits it with a harrowing level of physical and psychological detail. Its complexities and moral dilemmas make it a far cry from Marshall’s feel-good story, and distance it from Hollywood disaster movies in general — including Bayona’s own saccharine 2012 tsunami drama The Impossible. Spain’s official submission for the 96th Academy Awards is an intimate version of the real-life story most people associate with cannibalism.

Based on Pablo Vierci’s book of the same name, Society of the Snow is a brutal, chilly survivor story about 571’s crash en route to Santiago, Chile in 1972. Bayona’s approach to the “triumph of the human spirit” arc — often a broad, four-quadrant, feel-good cinematic flattening of real events — is both scrutinous and rigorous. It turns the concept inside out, presenting the ordeal of 571’s survivors as a murky scenario we’ve been granted secret, intimate access to.

The film begins with sweeping shots of the snow-capped Andes, a picturesque setting hiding painful secrets. One of the plane’s passengers, the reserved, contemplative Numa Turcatti (Enzo Vogrincic), provides mournful voiceover. He’s just one of the many young Uruguayan rugby players stranded in the mountains, far from civilization. Bayona and co-screenwriters Bernat Vilaplana, Jaime Marques, and Nicolás Casariego tether the story to Turcatti’s perspective for most of the movie, though they toy with the limitations of this decision in intriguing ways. After all, no single point of view can capture the full breadth of what the survivors experienced. Bayona seems acutely aware of that idea as he’s chronicling events: In cases where Turcatti wasn’t present, the events come to life through recollections shared with him later on.

But Turcatti’s voiceover binds the movie together because of his unique place in this story. He isn’t the hero, just someone reckoning with his uselessness in an increasingly despondent situation. The closest the film comes to a traditional “hero” protagonist is hotshot Roberto Canessa (Matías Recalt), whose early scenes portray him as capable but selfish on the rugby pitch, and whom the other players admonish for his lack of teamwork. The seeds for a straightforward character arc are planted early on — another version of the story might’ve followed Canessa finally learning to put others before himself. But Bayona isn’t focused on salvaging neat platitudes from the wreckage.

From the moment turbulence consumes the rugby team’s aircraft, their physical and emotional anguish takes center stage. Bayona re-creates their plane