SOCIETY OF THE SNOW – Review by Jennifer Green
Society of the Snow, Spain’s entry to the International Feature Film Oscar, landed a Golden Globe nomination for Best Non-English Language Feature. That could forecast a spot on the Oscar shortlist as well, which might come as a surprise. The International Feature category is often dominated by character-driven dramas with clear local flavor. Snow is a decidedly Hollywood-style disaster film backed by Netflix.
The two technical-oriented European Film Awards Snow took home – best visual effects and best hair and make-up – might be more expected recognition for this film’s achievements. A production involving a team of 800 professionals and a complicated phased shoot across four countries, Snow boasts an impressive and memorable array of visceral effects and sequences, and this is where the film truly excels – more than in character development.
The story is based on real events involving a 1972 chartered plane crash that killed upwards of two dozen people, among them members of a Uruguayan rugby team, and left others to fend for themselves for months in the freezing reaches of the Andes Mountains. The script was adapted from a book by Pablo Vierci, a former classmate of some of the survivors, and it was filmed in Spanish with a South American lead cast. This differentiates it from past screen adaptations of the same events, like Frank Marshall’s 1993 English-language Alive starring Ethan Hawke.
That may give the reenactments more authenticity, although Barcelona-born director JA Bayona doesn’t dwell on local cultural traits or customs beyond evoking a close-knit community and a default Catholicism, and filming street scenes in Uruguay and Chile. Instead, the film aims squarely at Netflix’s global international audience – a natural for Bayona, whose previous credits include Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and Thai tsunami epic The Impossible. Snow marks his first Spanish-language feature since 2007’s El Orfanato (The Orphanage).
The tale is told in voiceover from the perspective of a survivor of the initial crash. He offers some background and insights into the other survivors, though not a lot. Together with dialogues and flashbacks, the voiceover also raises some philosophical questions about the price, the value and the meaning of surviving.
But Bayona focuses more acutely on the physical challenges the men faced during the two and a half months they were stranded in the Andes. The result is that you can finish this film and still feel you don’t know a lot about any one of the characters. The story is about the group – the society – more than its individuals.
What you will recall, and in details that might be hard to forget, are the bodies being flung into the sky or violently crushed like an accordion in the plane crash, characters’ peeing black urine, the bones and flesh survivors have to eat off their dead friends, the wrath of nature’s deadly avalanches and unending storms and hidden valleys, the blackened eyes and exposed flesh and peeling lips of the men’s battered bodies.
For nearly two and a half hours, Snow explores this suffering, its technical team and cast doing an impressive job of recreating the events and the location. That detailed focus on the extremes of suffering, and the length of this film, could be too much for some viewers.
Uruguayan cinematographer Pedro Luque makes occasional use of extreme close-ups to give a sense of the loosening mental acuity of the survivors, but these can feel a little artificial. They are offset, however, by glorious wide shots that, together with visual effects, capture the vastness of the mountains separating the survivors from civilization.
These, more than the close-ups, convey the potential futility of their struggle to survive and, more than the dialogues or the voiceover, the psychological mountains these men had to climb as well.
