Netflix’s Latest Prestige Hit Dramatizes an Infamous Survival Tale—With an Ingenious Twist

It’s a curious feeling, watching a movie where you know almost everyone is going to die. It’s unlikely too many viewers of Society of the Snow, J.A. Bayona’s new movie about the 1972 crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 in the Andes, will know the names of the survivors off the tops of their heads, but we all know the upshot: The ones who made it out alive did so by eating the bodies of the dead. (You know, like in that other movie about the same incident, Alive.) As the film introduces us to its central figures, many of whom are members of a Montevideo rugby team, you can’t help but make the same calculations as you would in the opening minutes of a slasher movie. Is the camera lingering on this or that face because it’s marking out a main character, someone we’re still going to be following as they make their way out of the mountains? Or is it just milking a little more emotion from their imminent death, trading on the easy irony of our knowing that the goodbyes they are saying will be their last?

The last time Bayona made a movie based on a real-life disaster, he fell into the trap of imbuing his protagonists with plot armor. In The Impossible, members of the family that will survive the deadly 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean are set apart from the masses of soon-to-be dead Thailanders by the attention the camera pays to them, as well as their race and language. (The real family was Spanish, but the film casts the parents with the familiar English-speaking faces of Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts.) The effect is like hearing a report of a distant tragedy followed by the comforting assurance that no Americans were killed.

Society of the Snow starts with a much smaller population: The plane carried only 40 passengers and five crew members. But it’s impossible for a feature film to individualize nearly four dozen people in the space of a few minutes, and inevitably, many of them, especially the 17 who died either in the crash or during the first frigid night, are there simply to be knocked off. Bayona marks each death with on-screen text giving the name and age of the deceased, but eventually even that act of remembrance develops into a kind of rhythmic refrain: another day, another corpse. Sure, you’re watching a famous true story, one that’s been shortlisted for four Oscars and even tipped as a dark-horse Best Picture contender. But how different is it, really, from a Final Destination sequel whose plot is driven by the discovery of what horrible way the next person will die?

Bayona and his co-screenwriters, Bernat Vilaplana, Jaime Marques, and Nicolás Casariego, at least seem cognizant of the dangers of rendering the dead as little more than NPCs. (The movie is adapted from the nonfiction book by Pablo Vierci.) As the survivors who eventually hiked over the rim of the glacier that had hidden them from airborne searches, Agustín Pardella’s Nando Parrado and Matías Recalt’s Roberto Canessa—the roles played by Ethan Hawke and Josh Hamilton in the English-language version of the story—get pride of place. But in an ingenious if risky twist, the movie also places at its center one of the passengers who (spoiler alert for something that happened 51 years ago) did not survive: Enzo Vogrincic Roldán’s Numa Turcatti. It turns out to be his voice that has been narrating the story from the very beginning, and he continues on even after he dies, some 30 minutes before the credits roll.

Numa’s centrality matters because it allows Society of the Snow to position itself as a tribute to the victims rather than a triumphant story of survival in which the deceased are merely also-rans. Numa is notable for being the most prominent holdout when his fellow survivors make the decision to take advantage of the only source of nourishment available to them—an event the movie treats discreetly by having cousins Eduardo and Fito Strauch (Rafael Federman and Esteban Kukuriczka) perform the necessary butchery off-screen. (The movie’s most gruesome moments occur during the crash itself, when Bayona slows down the action so we can see bodies being crushed as the plane’s seats rip from the floor and smash together lengthwise, or a flight attendant’s leg being broken in several places at once.) The survivors funnel their misgivings about consuming their fellow passengers into a discussion of consent, which the dead, by their nature, are incapable of granting. But they clear the hurdle in part by offering up themselves in advance: If I die first, I want you to eat me too. Numa’s last act is to bless the endeavor, leaving a note paraphrasing the Gospel of John: “There is no greater love than to give one’s life for friends.”

For as much as Society of the Snow has its characters debate matters of morality and faith, though, it feels a little too pat to wind up the discussion by having Numa express his permission from beyond the grave. Perhaps those who lived long enough to die after the direness of the group’s situation became inevitable did commit to their own sacrifice, but it’s hard to swallow the implication that all of the dead would have made such a noble choice if provided the chance. It gives the story a whiff of the glib to turn it into a neat parable, insulating us from the sometimes necessary horrors of survival. It’s easy to conclude in retrospect that what you did was what you had to do, and the need is all the justification there is. It’s harder to face the idea that there might be situations when morality pertains only after the fact, and staying alive means having to live with it.