In 1972, Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 went down in a remote part of the Andes while ferrying the Old Christians rugby team, their friends and family members to a match in Chile. Of 45 passengers, 29 were alive after the crash. Rescue attempts were called off after eight days, however, leaving the desperate survivors to face storms, avalanches, high altitudes and food shortages. The group were soon driven to desperate measures, including cannibalism. After weeks of hardship, a group trekked across the mountains in search of help. They finally encountered a Chilean shepherd who alerted authorities, leading to the rescue of the 16 remaining survivors on December 20th, 1972, more than two months after the crash.
It’s a compelling story, one that has been repeatedly adapted, most recently in loose, gender-swapped form as the TV series Yellowjackets. The first film depicting the “Miracle of the Andes” was Survive!, a forgotten 1976 Mexican disaster flick. Alive, a 1974 book by Piers Paul Read, was translated into a 1993 movie hit for Ethan Hawke.
Working from a 2009 book by the Uruguayan journalist Pablo Vierci, and following considerable consultation with survivors and the families and friends of victims, JA Bayona, the Catalan director behind A Monster Calls and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, has fashioned a tactile, empathetic account of the tragedy. Impressive set pieces – including a juddering, white-knuckle depiction of the crash – sit alongside the heated ethical and religious considerations of eating crash victims, as mediated by a 24-year-old law student named Numa Turcatti (Enzo Vogrincic), the film’s narrator. The grisly business of cannibalism is handled without a trace of sensationalism, as a designated posse wearily assumes butchering duties.
Technically, it’s a marvel: the cinematographer Pedro Luque finds variations in the snowbound predicament. Laura Pedro and Montse Ribé rightly triumphed at the recent European Film Awards in visual effects and special-effects makeup.
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A welcome innovation is the foregrounding of the dead; previous iterations have focused only on the survivors. The casting of mostly unknown Argentine and Uruaguarn actors adds to the novelty, as does the film’s compelling depiction of survivors’ guilt after the “Heroes of the Andes” return to their home country.
Society of the Snow is in cinemas on Friday, December 22nd; it streams on Netflix from Friday, January 5th
