Released: 4th January
Seen: 7th January
In 1972 the Old Christians Club rugby union team boarded a plane in Uruguay, along with several family members and supporters, with the intent of getting to Chile to compete against an English rugby team. Part of this flight required a trip over the Andes mountain ranges, a trip that in normal conditions would be perfectly doable but the weather was bad enough to make it impossible to see. The details of how the crash happened are far too complicated to put in the opening paragraph of a film review but the core point is that the plane crashed in the snow-covered mountains, the 45 passengers and crew on board were effectively lost in the snow and debris.
From there the surviving passengers and crew (initially 33, 12 died upon impact) began a 72-day nightmare of trying to survive on the top of a snow-covered mountain with no supplies and no one knowing where they were. This survival would become a story of resilience and strength in the face of horrendous adversity, along with showing the strength of a community of people forced into brutal horrors. This real-world horror story has been turned into books by those who survived, several movies and stage shows and now is once again being adapted to film in Society Of The Snow, a front runner for the International Best Picture Oscar this year.
Society of the Snow (or La sociedad de la nieve in the original Spanish) takes the story and tells it as purely as possible, presenting a straightforward timeline of the events as we know them from the multiple accounts. We get the briefest amount of time to get to know and like the team before they board the plane but that’s enough time for us to be charmed by them, to see their warmth and playful humanity so that when the plane crashes and we’re thrown into the horror of their situation, it’s more impactful. You feel like you know these men, you live with them and never leave them for any reason. If they can’t leave the plane that they crashed in, why the hell should you?
Smartly Society of the Snow never cuts away from the rugby team, never leaving them to show what the rescuers are doing or even what their loved ones are thinking. It could’ve given us those moments of respite, allowed us to live in the knowledge that people were looking for them but Society of the Snow knows that the power comes from sitting with this team as they slowly lose their faith in everything. We watch the joy leave their faces, the colour of the film itself melts away the longer they’re stuck in the endless expanse of snow that they’re trapped in and it becomes this pressure cooker, just waiting and hoping for a rescue that feels like it will never make it in time.
All this intensity is captured brilliantly by the camera that alternates between letting us get close enough to see the damage being done to these men in real-time and pulling back so far that you see how impossible it might be to find them, it’s carefully crafted to just hold the audience right on the edge of absolute despair and keep you there for several hours. The only moments where the film dares to show anything light are cruel snapshots of these people in happier moments that are shown just when they die, a dark reminder of what was lost on that mountain.
While Society Of The Snow is incredibly dark and emotional, even downright brutal at times (Especially with showing the opening crash, which might be the most violent crash put on screen that wasn’t part of a Final Destination film) it’s also able to just barely keep within the lines of good taste. One well-known element of why the people on board the plane were able to survive as long as they did was that they engaged in survival cannibalism, since there were no food supplies they had to eat those who had died and you could imagine a version of this film that would lean into making that as disgusting as possible but Society of the Snow treats it with reverence. It gives it some dignity, showing the bare minimum they need to so everyone knows it happened but without needing to show the dead at all. It’s a powerful bit of restraint that makes what could’ve been something gruesome and horrific into an intensely depressing fact of nature.
That’s not to say that Society of the Snow isn’t horrific, there are several sequences that even the scariest horror film couldn’t begin to touch for the raw emotion of it. The initial crash, the avalanche, several moments throughout the film are absolutely terrifying and only get worse when you remember that real people actually went through this. It’s truly unnerving and also miraculous that anyone could make it through this, which helps give the film even more power. It’s kind of amazing how Society of the Snow can keep showing so much horror that these men went through, but keeping a strong undercurrent of hope underneath it that they hold for almost all of the film.
Society of the Snow is a brutally brilliant recreation of one of the most horrific things a human being could go through and does it in a way that honours the memory of the dead and the suffering of those who lived. It’s fantastically acted by a large ensemble cast who give everything to make this work, visually stunning with some truly nightmarish shots that show how isolated the survivors were and stunningly well-paced for a film well over 2 hours. It’s truly something fascinating to behold, handling something so intense and potentially taboo in such a way that it doesn’t lose any impact but doesn’t go for anything gratuitous. It’s no wonder why this is the film put forward to be the Spanish entry at the next Oscars, Society of the Snow should be seen by as many as possible.
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