MOUNTAIN SURVIVAL

TRAGIC STORY OF SURVIVAL PULLS HEART STRINGS

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

People constantly surprise the naysayers and surveyors of the human condition and what life throws in the way.

Director Juan Antonio García Bayona uses a 2h 25 m runtime to illustrate how 16 passengers on a flight from Uruguay to Chile survived a crash high up in the Andie Mountains on October 13, 1972.

Society of the Snow (2023) illustrates the art of life through the art of filmmaking.

Enzo Vogrincic stars as Numa Turcatti with a cast of 45 passengers and flight crew who include Agustin Pardella, Matias Recalt, Esteban Biglardi and Rafael Federman.

The screenplay has been adapted from the book by crash survivor Pablo Vierci.

The scene dialogue is much better subtitled than dubbed into English.

The narrative follows the 36 crash survivors as the group quickly dwindle to the remaining 29 trapped on the glacier who then become the 16 to ultimately survive. The first night when the temperature rapidly drops over the 30 minutes required for the sun to disappear from the sky and for the night to fall is just the start of the struggle for survival.

Bayona uses the silence of extreme environmental isolation to build tension in the narrative over a number of days along the narrative and through several scene sequences on screen. This silent tension builds and builds with just dialogue and background sounds until a score takes over action sequences and finally begins to drive the narrative to a conclusion.

The anticipation for a reversal nearly becomes excruciating.

Bayona tapers the tension at important moments with film art and aesthetics as the ten days that the survivors wait for a rescue turns into 40 days and then 60 days, and the 29 survivors becomes reduced to 20 and then 16.

The act of the characters taking still photographs to document their ordeal becomes a brief scene advance and then later a much more substantial narrative transition.

Various time advance techniques are used, although sparingly, such as one landscape montage to compress the time required climbing a mountain side covered in snow, and one or two, perhaps three, flashbacks splitting life and death moments.

The camera at times launches into a series of still life images with a panning camera moving through the airplane wreckage to focus on the deteriorating conditions of the remaining survivors as their position to wait out the extreme conditions until rescued becomes increasingly compromised.

The characters and the director have little room for sentimentality within the real life catastrophe and instead reach deep inside themselves to core values such as family, friendship, spirituality, brotherhood and a belief in God. And Bayona has more to say with the camera other than through the actors’ thoughtful dialogue.

The director’s overall vision is that the uniqueness that makes us human allows us to survive the greatest of adversity. The details accented by still life that individualizes the 45, the genuinely good, well rounded characteristics of the young men and women, and the richness of humanity, create a sense of survivorship among themselves, those who perished, and the world waiting for them to find a way home.

Society of the Snow is a Netflix Original film streaming since January 4.