‘Society of the Snow’ Revisits a Horrific, Often Retold Survival Story

If one wanted to, one could spend some four and a half hours vicariously experiencing the boggling hardships suffered by the passengers of an airplane that crashed in the Andes in 1972. That famous true story—of 16 men, many of them members of a Uruguayan rugby team, who somehow survived for 72 days before being rescued, resorting to cannibalism to feed themselves—is documented in two fictionalized films available for streaming: 1993’s Alive and 2024’s Society of the Snow, which just hit Netflix Thursday. Both take differing approaches to these harrowing, horrifying events, and both succeed and falter in their own ways. 

I first saw Alive when it was in theaters. I was 10 years old and was mostly fixated on the horror of the plane crash sequence and, later in the film, the gruesome scene where someone first cuts into human flesh and eats it. What I remember as tough and gritty is, on rewatch, very Hollywoodized and sentimental. Directed by Frank Marshall and written by John Patrick Shanley (of all people), Alive is steeped in heavy dialogue, much of it religious in theme. None of the principal performers—Ethan Hawke, Josh Hamilton, Bruce Ramsay, and Illeana Douglas among them—are Uruguayan, and of course they all speak in English. This was, I suppose, a more commercial, American way for the story to be presented, though something is undeniably lost in translation. 

Perhaps J.A. Bayona’s Society of the Snow is meant to correct some of that. The actors are all Uruguayan or Argentinian, and the entire film is in Spanish. Bayona, whose eclectic (if short) résumé includes a Jurassic World movie and the tsunami survival film The Impossible, also seeks more authenticity in staging the various nightmares these young men confronted during their odyssey. The cold is truly felt; the rush of avalanches is bracing and terrible. The crash scene, while slightly less operatic than Marshall’s, more harrowingly depicts what might happen to the human body during such a trauma. 

The film is grueling and enveloping, immersing us in a frigid hell from which no escape seems possible. Marshall’s film is demure, casual in comparison. Alive is more concerned with human spirit than human suffering; it’s lit and warmed by Tinseltown glow. Society of the Snow has its own poeticism—mostly in the form of voice-over delivered effectively by Enzo Vogrincic Roldán—but it is largely a brutal affair. One could read that as a bit of fetishization, though Bayona, blessedly, does not get lurid about the cannibalism. (Nor does Alive, though it is oddly a bit more direct about that topic than is Society of the Snow.) 

It perhaps helps that Bayona’s film is adapted from a more recently published book of the same title by Pablo Vierci, who knew many of the crash victims in childhood. Alive is based on a Piers Paul Read book that was published just two years after the crash. Maybe the 50-year span has given Vierci’s recounting a crucial perspective that Alive often lacks. Shanley’s adaptation swaps in grand platitudes about God where specific human dimensions are better suited. 

Yet Alive also lets us get to know particular characters—or, I should say, versions of real people—better than Society of the Snow does. Bayona keeps his people somewhat anonymous, to the point that it’s hard to tell who exactly has survived and who hasn’t at any given moment. Alive centers on the two men, Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa, who would eventually trek 38 miles across grueling mountain conditions in search of rescue. They are clearly defined heroes from just about the beginning of the film. Bayona, though, only brings them to the fore later on. They are played well by Agustín Pardella and Matías Recalt, but I craved more personality.

In all, though, Society of the Snow is a more engrossing film, attuned to modern, hardened sensibilities and ending on a well-earned note of something like ragged hope. Bayona’s film is mournful and respectful of the dead—a name and age appears on the screen each time a character dies (most of them were heartbreakingly young)—but also knows to give us the joy and catharsis of a prolonged rescue sequence. The ultimate effect is not unlike that of an epic war film: a sadness for what’s been lost, coupled with an almost giddy relief and elation for those who have survived. 

No film could fully capture the awfulness of this experience. But despite some of Bayona’s irksome flair, Society of the Snow does a sturdy enough job getting the point across. This was a horror from start to finish, from which a happy ending was somehow snatched—at least for 16 people. I’ll be thinking about them the next time I’m on an airplane flying over the mountains—which, come to think of it, is happening dreadfully soon.