143 min | R | December 22, 2023 | Netflix
A chartered plane carrying a Uruguayan rugby team slams into the Andes in 1972. The survivors spend more than two months deciding what they will do to live. Bayona films the part everyone whispers about and refuses to look away.
The film recreates the October 1972 crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 high in the Andes. A team of young rugby players and their friends survive the impact and then face cold, starvation, and an avalanche. To stay alive they eat the bodies of the dead. Bayona refuses to treat that choice as horror or scandal. The film is about the pact the living make with the dead and what survival costs the people who walk back down.
Enzo Vogrincic plays Numa Turcatti, who narrates the ordeal and serves as the film’s conscience. Agustín Pardella plays Fernando Parrado, who loses family in the crash and hardens into the man who insists on walking out for help. Matías Recalt plays Roberto Canessa, the medical student forced into decisions no student is trained to make. Diego Vegezzi plays Marcelo Pérez, the captain whose authority erodes as the mountain breaks every assumption he leads on. Esteban Bigliardi plays Javier Methol with a quiet grief that anchors the older men in the group.
J. A. Bayona directs from a script he wrote with Bernat Vilaplana, Jaime Marques, and Nicolás Casariego. He stages the crash as a single brutal sequence of shearing metal and snow that maps the geography of the fuselage the survivors will live inside. The makeup work tracks the bodies wasting across the weeks, and the actors shrink into the frame as the food runs out. The sound design isolates the wind and the dead air of altitude until the avalanche arrives as pure violence. Bayona keeps the camera close to faces and lets the white emptiness around them do the rest.
The film could have turned the cannibalism into a grim set piece. Bayona treats it as a sacrament instead. The survivors agree that their bodies belong to one another and that the dead will feed the living. That pact is the film’s whole argument, and it earns the argument without sentiment. Society of the Snow ends not with rescue but with the weight its survivors carry down the mountain.