Sunday, January 7, 2024

Society of the Snow (La sociedad de la nieve) movie review

 

“Society of the Snow” or “La sociedad de la nieve” in Spanish, is the true story of the 1972 Andes flight disaster which I know nothing about except for that one photo I have seen somewhere on the internet of a bunch of men in multiple layers of outerwear chilling (quite literally) near a plane wreckage. This tragic story follows a Uruguayan rugby team on flight to Chile for a match with some of their good friends onboard the Air Force Flight 571 to share what should have been a joyous work-cation turned deadly disaster.

The plane was split in half by a mountain, separating the front and back where Numa Turcatti (Enzo Roldán) witnessed his friend flew out of the plane screaming to his name. Director JA Bayona depicted the crash in the most devastating, most painful, gnarliest way possible, and one can only imagine how it really happened. For the longest time, we follow Numa’s POV of this unfortunate survival but as the movie goes on, you come to realise that he is not the lead, it is this surviving group. From 27 surviving passengers, the number slowly decreases as they hold on to extreme weather (minus 86 degrees when at night) and lack of food supplies which then resorted to the unthinkable. If that was not enough, at a point, they were buried in an avalanche for four fucking days desperately trying to surface!

Every misfortune they face, every decision they make to survive; as you see this happening on screen in the comfort of your home, the movie forces you to wonder: what would you do in this situation? Can you even survive? To survive in such an unliveable environment, our primal instincts would easily clash with our faith and principle, and the movie tests that especially when it comes to the group’s divide regarding how they should feed themselves.

You would not think like this if the actors here were not convincing. Fortunately for this movie’s benefit, the performances from all actors were impressive. What was even more impressive was the fact that most of the actors portraying these real-life characters are unknown Uruguayans and Argentines newcomers. Their emotional expressions and physical performances felt very real, you would have thought they experienced the tragedy firsthand.

JA Bayona proves that he is indeed a director who understands tragic histories and portrays that into a visual medium for all of us to go through. Whether it be the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in his 2012 movie “The Impossible” or the 1972 Andes flight disaster in “Society of the Snow”, he managed to capture the horrors of a disaster and its aftermath while challenging the audience with questions of faith, luck, humanity, and principle. While “The Impossible” hit closer to home (I had family in Aceh), “Society of the Snow” is a true miracle story I will never forget.


[5/5]


“Society of the Snow” is now streaming on Netflix.

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