‘Society of the Snow’ Review: The Stranded and the Faithful
Another movie tackles the story of the Uruguayan rugby players who survived a plane crash and turned to cannibalism.Filmmakers love survival stories, but there are aspects of the so-called “miracle in the Andes” that pose special difficulties for any movie, not least because, a half-century on, the most notorious turn that events took will be well known to most viewers going in.On Oct. 13, 1972, a Uruguayan plane bound for Santiago, Chile, carrying 45 people, including the rugby team known as the Old Christians, crashed in the Andes. By the time of a rescue operation 10 weeks later, 16 survived. They did so through a mix of resourcefulness, endurance, faith and, famously, the decision — in a snowy, mountainous environment without food — to eat the dead. Roberto Canessa, a survivor who became an eminent pediatric cardiologist and long-shot 1994 presidential candidate in Uruguay, told National Geographic that “anthropophagy” is a better word for what happened than “cannibalism,” which might imply killing people for consumption.Mingling shots from the Andes with locations in the Sierra Nevada mountains in Spain, the Spanish-language “Society of the Snow,” directed by J.A. Bayona (“The Orphanage”), has a verisimilitude missing from the 1993 film “Alive,” with its substantially American cast led by a pre-“Reality Bites” Ethan Hawke, sporting magazine-ready hair. But “Society of the Snow,” based on a book by Pablo Vierci, lacks the immediacy that comes from seeing the real survivors, a spectacle offered by the documentary “Stranded: I’ve Come From a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains” (2008).For an action veteran like Bayona, the crash is the easy part. The foreshadowing is relentless and redundant. “This could be our last trip together,” Pancho Delgado (Valentino Alonso), in the early Montevideo scenes, tells Numa Turcatti (Enzo Vogrincic), a passenger who narrates the film (and whose fate the movie reserves for one its cheaper tricks). In flight, a newspaper headline alerts viewers to a boat that has sunk off Montevideo’s coast. The young men discuss how dangerous it is to fly through the Andes because of the suction created by warm winds from Argentina and the cold mountain air.The plane accident is frighteningly visceral. Snow, debris and wind swirl through the opened fuselage. Rows of seats collapse like accordions, impaling some of the passengers. The soundtrack is a whir of rattling metal. After the wreckage comes to a stop, Bayona shoots the first moments in disorienting close-ups, as the characters struggle to piece together what just happened and the geometry of where they are.The long haul proves trickier from a dramatic standpoint. “The problem is, no movie can really encompass the sheer enormity of the experience,” Roger Ebert wrote of “Alive” 31 years ago, and that remains true today. Cinema does sight and sound well, but it’s less effective at capturing hunger, cold and duration, at least when duration is measured in days and weeks.Then there is the matter of how graphic this film ought to get; on that score, “Society of the Snow,” despite at least one rib cage visibly picked to the bone, stays coy. No version of this story has depicted the survivors’ decision to eat human flesh as hasty or carelessly reasoned. This time, once that choice is made, initially three men do the butchering out of the sight of the others. But when an avalanche snows in the group, killing some of them, suddenly eating meat without names and faces attached becomes impossible, Numa says in voice-over. Bayona then shows Roberto (Matías Recalt) cutting into some ostensibly non-anonymous flesh — but tactfully keeps out of frame anything identifiable about the body.The material is fundamentally gripping, and parts of it are tough to resist, including the first sighting of another person by Nando Parrado (Agustín Pardella) and Roberto after the two of them have spent days climbing their way toward civilization. But “Society of the Snow” is a perverse movie to watch the way most people will see it — on Netflix, in the comfort of their homes, with a refrigerator nearby.Society of the SnowRated R. Terror and solitude; anthropophagy. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 24 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More
