Only a short month after its initial release on Netflix in the United States in December of 2023, the Uruguayan movie “Society of the Snow” took the streaming service and overall country through a whirl-wind.
The film, based on the true story of a plane crashing in the Andes Mountains of Chile and the 16 out of the initial 45 passengers that survived. The movie starts with introducing the Uruguayan rugby players and family members that were on the plane on their way to Chile for a game. It then leads to the crash and the days that followed said crash, which takes the majority of the film.
The movie has some gruesome images during and after the crash, as well as a theme of cannibalism for survival, which could be a put-off for some and they may want to consider that before watching the film, though said scenes are brief.
To me, the film deserves the fanfare and positive reviews that it has gotten, as well as the nominations received and awards that it has won. The movie pulls you into the scenes and the emotions of the characters in a way that makes you feel for them and not be able to stop watching, as well as in some cases wanting to look away, but not being able to.
I read the book “Alive” which revolves around the same story in eighth grade and though I do not think that anything can top the book, the movie gives the audience a visual and more emotional outlook on the overarching story as well as the survivors.
Furthermore, while some might see the film and or other adaptations of the story as a story of success and resilience, and it is in a sense, the movie also shows the survivors view of themselves which they refer to as not being heroes, but those that were fortunate enough to survive and having to live with the trauma of what happened to them. To me, this is a blunt yet humanistic view that is not often shown in films, and to me that is what differentiated the film from so many others that I have seen.
