Society of the Snow Review

J. A. Bayona found Pablo Vierci's book while researching The Impossible and spent ten years trying to fund a big-budget film in Spanish before Netflix green-lit it. He cast young Uruguayan and Argentine unknowns, recorded more than 100 hours of interviews with the living survivors, and shot in Spain's Sierra Nevada and at the real crash site. Flight 571 has been filmed before, most famously as Alive, but never with this much attention to the people who did not come home.

The crash itself is one of the most frightening sequences in modern cinema, all noise and tearing metal, and a later avalanche is worse. Bayona and his cinematographer Pedro Luque make the mountains vast and indifferent and the fuselage a cramped, freezing home. Enzo Vogrincic, Matías Recalt and Agustín Pardella lead a cast of newcomers who never strike a false note, and the film treats the decision to eat the dead as a moral argument rather than a shock.

At 144 minutes it is long, and the middle stretch repeats its miseries. It won twelve Goyas, including best film and director, and earned Oscar nominations for international feature and makeup; survivors Roberto Canessa and Gustavo Zerbino wrote that it told their story in ways they found fresh after fifty years.