Society of the Snow–The Taste of Friendship

Society of the Snow is  a riveting Spanish film nominated this year for an  Academy Award as best foreign film.  The opening scenes feature a team of young rugby players  ready to board an Uruguayan flight to compete in an international competition in Chile.  All hyped up, testosterone driven to realize their  team’s rise to international stardom, the team’s plane crashes into  one of the remotest parts of the Andes and into the most hostile terrain imaginable.  Society of the Snow is  based upon  the 1972 Andes plane crash that is the Donner Pass equivalent of a brutally intense survivalist tale. Society of the Snow involves the horrific necessity of cannibalism in the inhuman conditions of a violent winter storm. 

With their strength weakening and no sign of help on the way, the surviving passengers must build a society based on  cooperation in order to confront their fate.  Increasingly, people die, some of whom are team members and friends, and their bodies are respectfully disposed of in the snow. The few snacks in the scattered luggage are shared until there is nothing left. The inevitable survival diet is acknowledged.  As the days turn into a week and then almost two weeks, the unimaginable must occur.  

What makes Society of the Snow a harrowing experience to watch, in part,  is due to the vivid cinematography.  First, in the airplane crash we see passengers suddenly sucked out of the fuselage and windows, flying up to the ceiling with faces contorted by fear.  The sound effects of bones crushing and blood gushing are visceral, forcing the viewer to participate vicariously in the crumpling, smashing, and disintegration of the plane.  Then the diet.  Exhuming, then chopping up body parts and forcing them down one’s throat without regurgitating is nausea-inducing.  Those who survive this ordeal eventually are emaciated, bluish from frostbite and illness, and traumatized.  The camera is unforgiving in zooming in on the young actors, who give magnificent performances. 

The frigid reality of the Andes environment is  the villain in this drama.   Mountains rage with the blinding force of snow battering the amputated, wounded plane and its passengers.  Government authorities call off their search for the plane after ten days.  

Society of the Snow does its best to capture the nightmare the survivors endured.  Perhaps equally important, the film captures what those who didn’t survive also might have experienced and their heroism in offering their bodies posthumously to their friends who must consume them.  Society of the Snow is more terrifying than any horror story. An aneurysmal shudder of a film.  Not easy to watch.

Availability: Netfllix

Note:  The tragic 1972 crash of this plane in the Andes has been told before in documentaries and feature films, most notably, in the 1993 movie “Alive”, starring Ethan Hawke.