Society of the Snow
Netflix release poster
Spanish	La sociedad de la nieve
Directed by	J. A. Bayona
Screenplay by	J. A. Bayona Bernat Vilaplana Jaime Marques Nicolás Casariego
Based on	La sociedad de la nieve by Pablo Vierci
Produced by	Belén Atienza Sandra Hermida J. A. Bayona
Starring	Enzo Vogrincic alias el amor de mi vida Matías Recalt Agustín Pardella Felipe González Otaño Luciano Chatton Valentino Alonso Francisco Romero Agustín Berruti Andy Pruss Simón Hempe Juan Caruso Esteban Bigliardi Rocco Posca Esteban Kukuriczka Rafael Federman Manuela Olivera Agustín Della Corte Tomas Wolf
Cinematography	Pedro Luque
Edited by	Jaume Martí Andrés Gil
Music by	Michael Giacchino[1]
Production companies	Misión de Audaces Films El Arriero Films Netflix
Distributed by	Netflix
Release dates	9 September 2023 (2023-09-09) (Venice) 13 December 2023 (2023-12-13) (Uruguay) 15 December 2023 (2023-12-15) (Spain) 22 December 2023 (2023-12-22) (United States) 4 January 2024 (2024-01-04) (Netflix)
Running time	144 minutes
Countries	Spain[2] United States[2]
Language	Spanish
Budget	€60 million[3]

Society of the Snow (Spanish: La sociedad de la nieve) is a 2023 survival thriller film directed by J. A. Bayona, centered around the Uruguayan 1972 Andes flight disaster.^[4] It is an adaptation of Pablo Vierci's book of the same name,^[5] which documents the accounts of all 16 survivors of the crash, many of whom Vierci knew from childhood.^[6] The cast is composed of Uruguayan and Argentine actors, most of whom are newcomers.^[7]

The film closed the 80th Venice International Film Festival in an Out of Competition slot.^[8] It was theatrically released in Uruguay on 13 December 2023,^[9] in Spain on 15 December 2023,^[10] and in the US on 22 December 2023,^[11] before streaming on Netflix on 4 January 2024.^[12]

Society of the Snow received positive reviews, with some critics calling it Bayona's best work. The film was submitted for the Best International Feature Film at the 96th Academy Awards, representing Spain; it has been included on the December shortlist.^[13]

Plot

In 1972, the Uruguayan Air Force flight 571, chartered to transport a rugby team to Chile, experiences an unexpected incident and crashes into a glacier in the heart of the Andes. Of the 45 passengers on board, only 16 manage to survive. Trapped in one of the most inaccessible and hostile environments on the planet, they are forced to take extreme measures to stay alive. Their survival will depend on the decisions they make in the midst of this desperate situation.

Cast

^{[15][16][17][18]}

Production

Bayona discovered Vierci's book while researching for his 2012 film The Impossible, and bought the rights for the book when he finished filming that movie. The filmmakers recorded more than 100 hours of interviews with all of the living survivors. The actors had contact with the survivors and the families of the victims.^[19] Society of the Snow was announced in November 2021.

Principal photography took place in Sierra Nevada (Spain); Montevideo, Uruguay; Chile and Argentina, including the actual crash site in the Andes.^[20] Filming in Sierra Nevada lasted from 10 January to 29 April 2022.^[21][14] Filming in Uruguay concluded in late July 2022,^[17][22][14] and production continued then in Madrid.^[17] Production took the total of 138 shooting days, with its budget reported to be over €65 million.^[23]

In August 2021, the second unit, headed by Alejandro Fadel, Argentine director of Murder Me, Monster, filmed landscapes in Chile for reference in on-set virtual production and post-production.^[7][6][24] In Sierra Nevada, the production was challenged by a scarcity of snow, and by Saharan Air Layer which covered the mountains with orange dust.^[7][25] Three replicas of fuselage wreckages were used: one was placed in a hangar built in a parking lot,^[26] another buried in artificial snow and supported by a hydraulic crane that allowed moving the fuselage, and the other above a tarn at 3,000 m (9,800 ft) high.^[6][7][24] In the hangar, a 30-metre-tall screen displayed the second unit's footage of the Andes.^[7][25][24] The third unit was tasked with more dangerous mountain shots.^[7] The three units consisted of around 300 workers.^[6][7]

David Martí and Montse Ribé, Academy Award–winning special effects makeup artists of Pan's Labyrinth, created prosthetic corpses and wounds.^[7][24] Post-production was planned to last about five months involving 300 personnel.^[7][6] Vierci, who serves as an associate producer, visited the set in Sierra Nevada.^[6]

Bayona showed an early version of the film to one of the survivors, José Luis "Coche" Inciarte, before he died in July 2023.^[23] The 14 remaining survivors saw the film one or two months prior to the premiere.^[23][19]

Music

Release

J.A. Bayona and some cast members along with the disaster survivors Carlos Páez Rodríguez, Fernando Parrado and Roberto Canessa at the Venice prémiere of the film

The film was set as the 80th Venice International Film Festival's closing film, with a world premiere out-of-competition screening at the Palazzo del Cinema slated for 9 September 2023, following the festival's awards ceremony.^[8] It was selected to screen in the Perlak section at the 71st San Sebastián International Film Festival in September 2023.^[27] It also screened in the Out of Competition section at the 56th Sitges Film Festival,^[28] and at the 2023 AFI Fest.^[29]

The film was programmed for a technical screening run from 20 to 26 October 2023 in the Cine Aragonia of Zaragoza.^[30] It received a Spanish theatrical release on 15 December 2023^[31] and was released in US theatres on 22 December 2023.^[11]

Reception

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 90% of 87 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.9/10. The website's consensus reads: "Society of the Snow brings masterful technical skill to bear on its tale of real-life tragedy, but none of that spectacle comes at the expense of its simple, powerful message."^[32] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 70 out of 100, based on 25 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.^[33]

Guy Lodge of Variety deemed the film to be a "brawnily effective tear-jerker", "which grips with alternating waves of dread, horror and heart-swelling relief, even as it can hardly surprise".^[34]

Wendy Ide of ScreenDaily wrote that the film "is elevated by bracingly muscular action sequences".^[35]

Pete Hammond of Deadline wrote that Bayona made a "story of how humanity comes together for each other in the worst of circumstances, how faith can see us through, and the sheer will to live involved in just simply pulling off a miracle by never giving up".^[36]

David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter wrote that Bayona reclaims "the real-life tragedy and story of human resilience... with authenticity and chilling realism, with emotion but without sensationalism", underscoring the film to be "uneven but ultimately effective".^[37]

Professor Jorge Majfud (author of Cine político latinoamericano) points to the media and sociological phenomenon of this new version that repeats the plot of previous films without a rereading to justify it, because it is a commercial phenomenon that exploits a tragedy that complies with racial and class patterns, typical of the dominant Anglo-Saxon cultural industry.^[38]

See also

• Alive (1993 film)
• List of Spanish films of 2023
• List of Spanish submissions for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film

References

External links

• Society of the Snow on Netflix
• Society of the Snow at IMDb