Society of the Snow - a film review

This is a first for me, commenting on a film I can't praise highly enough for its conception, production, acting and message while suggesting that most people might find it too unpleasant to watch. I'm talking about the film streaming on Netflix since January called La Sociedad de la Nieve - Society of the Snow, in English. It's a film version of a book by the same name about a plane crash in the Andes in 1972, in which a crew of Uruguayan rugby players, on their way to a game in Chile, were reduced to cannibalism to stay alive.

I'm in good company in thinking the film is exceptionally worthy of the awards it has received and the positive commentary. It obviously took some doing to get past the gruesome facts of terror associated with being in a plane crash and cannibalism.

Society of the Snow takes head-on the question of how far we would all go to stay alive. Its central focus is the meaning of life. At various points throughout the 72-day-long ordeal the sixteen survivors of the crash had to contend with not just the possibility but the likelihood that they would freeze or starve to death.

I watched the film only because a friend without Netflix access asked to watch it at my house, so for me it was more a social event than a film-watching experience. The first fifteen or twenty minutes or so I nearly left the room because the images of air turbulence (I've never been a comfortable flier) and the terror of the crash made me wonder why one would subject oneself to this degree of horror. But once it began to sink in just how well the film was put together, I became glued to the screen. It's two and a half hours long, but the tension is compensated for by the gradual discovery of the high quality of filmmaker, J. A. Bayona's direction.  It was filmed in chronological order so that the actors could lose weight and make the notion of slow starvation come alive. Ditto with the growth of facial hair, chapped lips and damage to the skin on their faces. The actors speak Rioplatense Spanish, i.e., the language of the actual victims of the 1972 Uruguayan crash victims.

What came through as powerful filmmaking even more than these efforts to create verisimilitude, though, was the spiritual message of what it can mean when people face hard times as a team and hold to integrity despite temptation to let the devil take the hindmost.  Advocates of sports as a means of instilling character in kids have an ally in this film; one assumes it is the victims' conditioning to function as a single cooperating unit that kept them alive. 

Further, the survivors actually debate the morality of using the flesh of their friends to stay alive on. The biggest hurdle is not the disgust of the very idea of cannibalism but the fact that they were never given permission by the dead victims to use their bodies in such a way. In the end, those in the throes of dying actually make a point of extending that permission to their colleague-survivors. I suspect most viewers of this film will wonder for some time whether they would embrace death rather than engage in cannibalism. How many moments in our lives have we felt obliged to ask such ethical questions?

Watching Society of the Snow was a memorable experience. I repeat: I cannot in good faith recommend that you watch it - it's beyond gruesome. But if you can grin and bear it, watch it as a sign of respect for film as an art form which some people handle with a great show of talent.  And be glad there are folk unafraid to ask meaningful life-and-death moral questions.

Society of the Snow is a film to watch - not on a casual night out, but - when you're ready to give some time to a serious consideration of the meaning of life.

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