Society of the Snow (2023)

​Rated R for a wealth of death, leading to cannibalism.  There's a lot of upsetting imagery in this movie.  To show how hungry the survivors were, there's a scene showing a character urinating a black stream.  There's some language, but that pretty much takes a back seat to the upsetting death that pervades the film.  

DIRECTOR: J.A. Bayona

I never saw the original Alive.   I knew the story, basically.  I feel most people from my generation knew this story, even if they hadn't seen Alive.  It actually became a weird talking point.  We all knew that it was a true story, but it almost became this urban legend.  Now, because I hadn't seen Alive, I treated the story in the exact way that I wasn't supposed to.  It was a scary story.  It was something joked about.  Now, I can't testify to Alive on its authenticity or anything.  But the most important thing that J.A. Bayona did for this story is to give it gravitas for a new generation.

One of the things that my wife tends to do after watching a biopic (although it has been known to happen while watching the biopic) is that she'll Google / Wikipedia the real story. Perhaps why Society of the Snow is separating itself from its peers is that it is apparently the most accurate historical movie out there about the subject.  Beat for beat, as much as could be recreated, it happens on screen.  Now, normally, I would guess that real life doesn't necessarily translate out to effective narrative.  With this, it is so much about character that the beats of the story just color how we perceive these characters. I won't lie.  There are so many characters in this story that it is often hard to keep track of who is who.  But I do know that there's a big mislead in the movie.  It's so hard to make a story about an ensemble and still have us care about these characters.  That's where Bayona does something kind of incredible.  Because there is no one leader of this plane crash, with people stepping into the role as needed, there needed to be something to (pun that needs absolute pardoning) ground the whole piece.  The fact that it is told from Numa's perspective, someone who doesn't actually survive the events, is fascinating.

Part of that comes from a whole defying of expectations.  Historically and culturally, we know that there were survivors of the crash.  One of the first things that my wife looked up was the number of survivors.  She was doing a mental checklist of who was going to make it through these awful conditions.  But the movie built Numa like he had plot armor.  (My deepest apologies for writing so casually about the dead.  While I acknowledge that these were real people who had real families, there still is a little disconnect with me beyond the fact that Numa, as I see him on screen, is a character.) Numa as the voice of the deceased gives agency to the departed in a way that this movie had to prove challenging.  The thing that everyone waits for in this movie, beyond salvation, is the idea of "When are they going to start eating each other?"  It's something so horrific that our darker insights kind of propel that thought.  It's the idea that screams louder than anything else.  It's not like they save that revelation for the end.  They start eating each other, in the grand scheme of things, pretty early on. 

But when corpses are being eaten and humanity is stripped away from people because of a horrible accident, giving voice to the dead is perhaps the most powerful a movie like this can do.  Society of the Snow is, without a doubt, about the survivors.  But even more than just the survivors, it is about the dead as people.  The movie keeps reminding us about the constant consent that was happening in that fuselage.  Now, if there was ever a thing that could be contested is whether or not they talked about permission to eat a corpse as much as the movie showed them doing. I don't know.  I wasn't there.  But Numa's reticence to cross that line made him the ideal voice for the movie.  Outside of understanding the outrage of "some things just aren't done", that skepticism is what ultimately contributed to his death.  Thus, Numa becomes us.  For all of the intellectual understanding that no one could survive for approximately seventy-something days out in the frozen mountains without having to do something abhorrent, there still is the morality of the heart. 

Numa, like us (ideally, chooses not to eat people.  At first, there are wisps of judgment coming from him.  But he also has this great empathy for others.  He personally chooses to avoid eating people for as long as he can --eventually submitting against his morals --but understands that there are people that he loves that he doesn't want to see dead. There's also this reminder that this wasn't cannibalism like we imagine.  This isn't Yellowjackets, where there's reverie and celebration over the discovery of an alternative food source. Instead, we see those who burdened themselves with the preparation of the bodies and how those tiny bites of food were done with chagrin and regret.  No one there wants to eat the bodies.  They do grow comfortable with it eventually.  I don't think the movie shies away from the notion that a repeated action, done over a long period of time, eventually washes away some stigma.  But the dead are always treated as people.  Perhaps it makes it even grosser when one of the survivor has to vomit up a body part that thaws as he gets to warmer climates.  

The scale of this movie is insane.  It's one of those incredibly filmed movies.  The survival movie isn't anything necessarily new.  But Society of the Snow takes what is fundamentally an isolated location and makes it the most claustrophobic setting in a grand tapestry of majesty.  The setting is what makes us question the events of the story.  There's almost something interactive about the whole experience of watching this.  I know that my students who saw this movie were doing this and I'm not guilty either.  The location of the Andes and how it looked instantly caused debate on how they would handle the same events.  Me?  I'm in the "go one direction and try your best."  After that miserable first night in the fuselage, with all of the luggage as a wall, I don't know if I would have considered the inside of the fuselage any better than the outside of the exposed nature.  None of that is fair.  I wasn't in that situation.  For all I know, I'm talking a big game right now when realistically, I would have been one of the people cowering in the plane, hoping someone else would make the hard calls.  But that's what Bayona does for the film.  He makes it something that we can't divorce ourselves from. It's never just noise on screen.  Those debates are the debates that we have and we invest ourselves in when watching the film.

Yet, I have a hard time giving this movie a perfect score.  I don't know if I can find a fault with the film whatsoever, beyond my lazy brain that has a hard time remembering people's names.  I mean, part of that comes from the notion that I don't know who to recommend this movie to.  Structurally and artistically, J.A. Bayona does everything right in this movie.  Part of what makes it hard to talk about is the gruesome content within.  I'd love to recommend this movie to my in-laws.  It's never a boring movie.  The characters are great.  It's well-filmed.  So why am I so hesitant to say "You need to watch Society of the Snow?"  I mean, that comes with the territory.  I tend not to recommend horror movies either. But I also know that it isn't one of my favorite movies this year.  Perhaps it goes on just a little too long?  The movie demands that we understand how long seventy-something days is.  If it was any shorter, the film would have detracted from the sheer magnitude of events and time.  But that also means that we have to watch a lot of people rotting away in the cold.   

Maybe it's the fact that it just isn't a happy movie.  Maybe if I watched this at a different time, I would be swearing by this movie up and down.  I think I'm in that weird place where I have a glut of great movies that are a bit more chipper.  It's objectively a great movie, but I have a hard time really selling it right now.