‘Society of the Snow’ Venice Film Festival 2023 Review: A Real-Life Disaster Adapted to Directionless Drama
Survival stories have always generated a kind of fervor that engages the audience’s worst and best impulses, prompting both voyeurism and deep empathy. People’s accounts of living through tsunamis, earthquakes, and bear attacks all force us to calculate our dizzying nearness to death, like micro-dosing our deepest fears. Society of the Snow is the pinnacle of this kind of story, living in the rut between the outrageous and the eerily possible.
As reported in countless headlines: in 1972 a young rugby team managed to survive a deadly air crash in the Andes, slowly eating the bodies of their frozen teammates over the course of 71 days. Eventually, two of the players flag down help following an 11-day hike across a treacherous mountain range. On the surface, this is a story that lends itself to the big screen, a costly adventure weaving together threads from multiple genres (horror, drama, psychological thriller). But the scope is so unbelievable that it could get stuck in the more sensational elements, flattening the film into something colorless and atonal.
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Director J.A. Bayona has already made his mark on the natural disaster subgenre with The Impossible, a hugely successful account of the 2004 tsunami and how the Bennett family survived. His obvious preoccupation with man’s ability to physically withstand the world’s harshest conditions is a fascination saddled with some obvious cinematic pitfalls. Such stories often coil around a climactic event that strikes the characters early in the film’s runtime, with the following events then unfurling in a somewhat predictable, gory succession.
Despite such obvious limits, Bayona’s skill for capturing gruesome, bone-rattling, real-life disasters, feels singular, refined against a sea of CGI-ed, bloodless action films. The plane crash in Society of Snow channels the head-snapping rapidity of the real thing with quick cuts between character reactions and the machine itself; channeling a swelling sense of disaster about to tip over the audience. Metallic crashes and snaps are wielded as tools, permanently etching this tragedy into the boy’s bodies.
Each of these young actors is remarkably adept at embodying the uncertainty hanging over the group in the aftermath of the crash. They desperately swing around in dizzying circles, pointing out a potential leader, itching to cling to them. As hunger settles over them, ideals dissipate, buried under layers of rapidly rising snow, with questions settling like a thick grime over each of the characters and sucking oxygen from the body of this discarded plane.
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Bayona shoots the inside of this metal carcass carefully, never traveling from one end to the other and instead lending it mythic proportions, forcing it to constrict in the shadow of the oncoming avalanche before hopelessly expanding across the freezing cold nights. Bayona understands that it is both a haven and a dead-end path for these boys, keeping them comfortable enough to stay put, tortured by the elements, and suspending the audience in limbo.
Part of this film’s failure is its inability to ascertain the specifics of the group’s survival. Backstories are dispersed evenly across a wide collection of characters—each with their own motivation for climbing out beneath the rubble. Ultimately most experiences remain largely unmined and untapped, and as such, even in its loudest moments, Society of the Snow is governed by a deafening silence that feels solid and opaque, like that ice coating everything in this ungovernable landscape.
Summary
While it has a compelling story, ‘Society of the Snow’ is ultimately a bit flat and unbelievable despite its real-world inspiration.
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