JA Bayona brings visual flair and existential dread to a true story of survival. Our review of Society Of The Snow:
An air of cosmic horror lingers over Society Of The Snow. When you’re faced with nothing but coldness and almost certain death, how do you find the will to carry on?
Director JA Bayona is no stranger to true-life stories of disaster and survival. Among his earlier work is 2012’s The Impossible, about the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and he brings the same elemental sense of danger to his latest film, based on the book of the same name by Pablo Vierci. If anything, Society Of The Snow’s lack of starry names makes it feel even more fearsome than The Impossible did – there’s no Ewan McGregor or Naomi Watts to ground us here.
Society Of The Snow is presented largely from the perspective of Numa Turcatti (Enzo Voginci Roldan), a 24 year-old law student who tags along on a flight from Montevideo to Santiago, Chile on the 13th October 1972. When the plane crashes, Numa and the rest of the survivors – mostly rugby players playing for a team called The Old Christians – are left stranded in the Andes, struggling through day after day of freezing conditions with no idea when – or if – help will come.
It’s a harrowing story that has been brought to the screen more than once in the past; there was a little-seen Mexican production, Survive!, made just after the incident in 1976. More highly-regarded was Alive, Frank Marshall’s 1993 handling of the story which starred a fresh-faced Ethan Hawke.
In retrospect, that film brought a distinctly Hollywood sheen to what was a truly harrowing ordeal for everyone involved, but Bayona goes for the complete opposite; Society Of The Snow is witheringly unsparing in its depiction of starvation and suffering. That it’s shot with a largely unknown Uruguayan cast, who speak in their own tongue, only adds to the realism.
No stranger to horror, Bayona brings all his skill to bear on the early plane crash sequence – in terms of claustrophobic photography, dizzying editing and aggressive sound design, it’s perhaps one of the most unsettling sequences of its type this writer’s seen on film. (Interestingly, Alive’s own crash scene was singled out for praise in the early 90s; Bayona’s arguably bests it for sheer ferocity.)
Thereafter, the story – co-written by Bayona – becomes not just about survival, but also retaining hope. Time and again, Bayona presents his characters as tiny grey specks against an expanse of white stretching out to infinity. The world he creates is unfeeling, harsh, and can change in a second. It’s a marked contrast to the warmth of the film’s opening moments, one of which takes place in a church as an ominously apt passage from The Bible’s read out (“Man shall not live by bread alone…”).
Far from a film about Catholic guilt, though, Society Of The Snow is instead a distinctly existentialist survival story. Hope is found not in a higher power, but in its characters’ own will to survive. In terms of texture and tone, Society Of The Snow bears comparison to JC Chandor’s All Is Lost, Joe Carnahan’s The Grey, or even David Fincher’s compromised yet singularly elemental Alien 3.
Bleak though the film often is, Bayona shows less interest in the potentially lurid subject of cannibalism than might be expected; although there are scenes that will make more sensitive viewers blanche, the filmmaker handles the subject with restraint. Several characters question the morality of eating another human being – Numa is one of a handful who initially resist – but both they and the filmmakers conclude that it’s the only logical option. As unthinkable as it may seem, it’s unlikely that most people watching would make a different choice in the same situation.
Strikingly, Bayona barely allows his older survivors to speak; one female character gets precisely one line of dialogue, while another middle-aged survivor is given a deeply moving monologue about the nature of love, but remains silent elsewhere. It’s a storytelling choice that might irk some viewers, but is perhaps intended to underline one of the film’s themes: Society Of The Snow is about that moment most of us experience in young adulthood, when our sense of indestructibility is replaced by the realisation that we’re both mortal and fragile.
It is, in short, the most chilling coming-of-age story imaginable.
Society Of The Snow is out in UK cinemas on 22nd December 2023, and streams on Netflix from 4th January.
