Society of the Snow (2023)

J. A. Bayona's Society of the Snow arrives with the full weight of a Netflix budget, two Academy Award nominations, and a determination to tell the 1972 Andes crash in Spanish with Uruguayan and Argentine unknowns. This is a corrective to the 1993 Hollywood version, which cast Americans and shot on a soundstage. The gesture registers, faintly, as cultural authenticity. It is not a diversity exercise. The survivors were a homogenous group of Catholic rugby players from Montevideo, and the film does not pretend otherwise.

What the film does not do is preach. There is no antagonist, no villainous corporation, no collapsing ecosystem to blame. The enemy is a glacier and a lack of food. The survivors eat the dead, which is the precise opposite of an affirmation of any body. No character pauses to interrogate masculinity, whiteness, or the extraction economy. The Catholic faith is treated with sincerity, not irony. The rugby club is a brotherhood, not a patriarchy requiring dismantling. The film's spiritual register is existential and communal, and it resists the urge to convert suffering into a lesson about the audience.

Where it does nudge the historical record, it does so gently. Bayona foregrounds the voices of the passengers who did not come home, giving narration to the dead, which mildly revises the survivor's-triumph template of earlier tellings. The survivors themselves have noted the absence of cynicism in the result. We are left with a well-made film about cold, hunger, and the will to live, competent, moving, and almost entirely free of the contemporary sermonizing that has become standard issue. A rare vintage. It pairs well with silence.