Society of the Snow Is A Thriller For The Ages

Based on true events, Society of the Snow (La Sociedad de la Nieve) is a Spanish-language Netflix Original film directed by J.A. Bayona and based on the book by Pablo Vierci. In October 1972, a plane carrying a rugby team and their friends and family crashed in the Andes between Chile and Argentina. Miraculously, many of the passengers survived the initial crash. The two and a half hours that follow tell the unbelievable tale of their survival.

Society of the Snow is hardly about characters. It has a huge ensemble of mostly men, roughly around the same age, with similar temperaments, body language, looks, and attitudes. They’re all rugby players, for the most part, after all. The movie has a narrator who adds drama and emotion. There are also many intimate moments held between characters. But the characters themselves are not really the focus. This is not to say that the movie doesn’t pay the utmost respect to the real people who lived and died on that mountain. It certainly does through its on-screen accounting of every death. There’s also a touching focus on the items they left behind. But in the end, what makes Society of the Snow one of the all-time great survivalist movies is how intensely it makes you feel like you’re on that mountain, too.

In fact, by losing focus on the individuality of the characters, you’re more easily able to let go of some of the haunting parts of their survival tale because you’re a bit more detached from them, and you’re more able to insert yourself into the frigid mountain with them. From the moment the movie starts turning towards the worst, the sound design completely envelops you in terror. The rattling plane before it goes down has nothing on the winds of whipping cold or the dead silence right before an avalanche. The score itself keeps you on a constant edge when things are at their worst. It also fills you with hope when the survivors are feeling their highest.

The fact that nearly the whole movie is set in the single location where the plane crashed and the survivors are taking refuge compounds the anxiety. All you can see around them through gorgeous aerial shots are literal mountains of snow in every direction. The slowly building disgusting nature of the survivors’ physical conditions, as well as the crash site itself, make the unpredictability of their eventual savior painful, and the movie does have some slightly graphic moments. But for the queasy, it never crosses a line into completely graphic depictions of their conditions or survival methods, even if there’s a lot of inference and the occasional closer look.

Even if their eventual rescue is inevitable, given the nature of this type of true story, there are so many ups and downs to their time on the mountain that you can never tell what means of survival will work and what will backfire. Sometimes, things go just as planned, and sometimes, things just make everything worse. Because there is hardly a central character to follow for a lot of the movie, no individual feels like they have plot armor. That notion seems dispensed with intentionally to make every moment all the more unpredictable and suspenseful.

When the characters do sit down and get close to each other, it’s rarely to explore their backstories or anything too specific to them as individuals. Rather, it’s a means of exploring larger philosophical questions about life, death, and the universe. For the first half of the movie, this was slightly frustrating because the conversations were fairly one-note and about religion. The survivors rarely fight with each other, which keeps the stress level down somewhat. But it also means there was little tension in the early parts of the movie. Of course, after a few major setbacks and several deaths, the Society of the Snow does get around to more varied conversations about sacrifice, love, and survival. They’re still rather dull and forgettable, but they at least break up the pace of the movie between the moments teetering survivalism and disaster.

Society of the Snow uses its sound design, setting, and the false security of brief levity to create a deeply upsetting atmosphere. Made more intense by how easy it is to settle yourself right into the thick of the situation, it’s an unbelievable testament to human determination and a survivalist thriller for the ages.

Society of the Snow is streaming now on Netflix.