Cold Hard Truth

Society of the Snow is one of the most “makes sense” director-material pairings in recent memory. J.A. Bayona of horror (The Orphanage) and inspirational disaster porn schmaltz (The Impossible) affinity has found the perfect story to fuse his dual proclivities: The 1972 Andes mountains plane-crash survival of the cannibal soccer team. Though there are already two narrative features based on the incident, 1976’s Survive! and 1993’s  Alive (the latter of which features Hollywood names John Malkovich and Ethan Hawke), it’s still a story many will familiarize themselves with and say “they should make a movie of that!” Partly out of ignorance of the past but largely because of the existing films’s subpar quality, Society of the Snow renews the story’s promise to endure, thanks both to Netflix prominence and true quality.

Bayona may not spring to mind as a great director. His oddball 2016 A Monster Calls sums up his reputation as an indie-prestige melodrama tweener. His turn in the auteur subsuming, “director in name only” corporate arena for the billion-dollar Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom further muddled his career’s niche, although he shocked the world by turning in one of the most artful of such films.

Indeed, Fallen Kingdom is somehow one of the best recent Gothic haunted house stories, outstripping nearly all more straightforward attempts, and the first Jurassic film to not only recapture the full on horror of the famous original’s T-Rex scene, but enrich the material’s latent genre potential with the iconographic film language of the ghost film, of all things. He doesn’t merely revision the dinosaurs therein as monsters, but as ghosts of the past, imbuing what should by all rights be artless sludge like platonic hack Colin Trevorrow’s unholy 2015 reboot with workmanlike humility and spiritual intrigue. With that, Bayona landed solidly on my radar, and he capitalizes in Society of the Snow.

Society of the Snow’s first 15 minutes unfortunately remind us of Bayona’s worst instincts. Pointless, intelligence-insulting voiceover summarizes the story’s events before it even begins (just start with the plane crash, hello?) and persists through the whole film. He establishes characters, or attempts to, even though they will be indistinguishable by act two. It’s a classic error: the representation of emotion without embodied understanding. Luckily, intent is irrelevant, and this uninspired inspiration itself ends up the subject of the film’s most substantial metacommentary.

As blatant as it is, the feel-good survival story’s dependence on the macabre queasily erodes its positive vibe. There’s no true immorality on display; the fraternity is pure love, as part of its “golden retriever-person” shorthand for the humanity that the survivors must. However, the only way for our boys to do that is to engage the taboo of eating flesh, which we associate mythically with an oft literal loss of humanity, and upon which the movie provides a brief textual moral debate is only brief.  Our characters are little more than what they eat. A messy, tone-disrupting ending in which our narrator admits to a lack of core meaning bears this out.

But Society of the Snow completes itself with its brilliant direction. Bayona flexes brutal tactility in the awaited plane-crash scene as well as a later avalanche scene, as bones and metal crunch, greased by blood, and broken bodies quiver with screams re-rendered animal. It’s a stark vision of a cold hell. Indeed, the typically placid and pure element of Snow is finally as cold as the void, as our characters’ labored attempts to traverse the unshapen terrain burst our anthropocentric bubble. The next time I’m walking up some stairs, I’ll be grateful for not falling on my face and sliding back down 50 feet. Society of the Snow ultimately leaves us with a dark anti-transcendence. When you apply filmic platitudes to a true story, the spirit itself just becomes meat.