Today my voice carries their words

Starting my trip up Empire's top 20 films of 2023

#20 :  La Sociedad De La Nieve (Society Of The Snow)

Christmas. Such a jolly holiday, fun and festive and heart-warming. The perfect time, then, to release J.A. Bayona’s Society Of The Snow, a devastating film which clobbers you with trauma after trauma, ripping your nerves to pieces. But! This exceptionally bleak dramatisation of the aftermath of a horrendous plane crash actually is fantastically heart-warming. And there’s certainly a lot of snow. Perfect Christmas content, then. It is, though, a lot: in 1972, a plane transporting 45 people crashed in the Andes. Over the next 72 days, the survivors – stuck in an impossible situation, with little hope of getting through it – faced the most extreme physical and spiritual hardship imaginable. In portraying their ordeal, though, Bayona gives us a film that illustrates what human beings are truly capable of. It’s incredibly inspiring, and emotionally exhausting. And it may well put you off flying for life. But it will fill your heart. A towering, powerful piece of work.

I have heard of this (which doesn't appear on The Guardian's list), but I've also heard it's pretty grim - and Empire haven't gone out of their way to disabuse me of that notion, have they?  And I don't generally do well with grim - so let's see, shall we?

Well the first thing to say is that this is very impressively shot - there's beautiful, beautiful scenery and it's very realistically filmed. I've read a few articles on the film and they did film a lot of it up a mountain, carrying the equipment up and down every day (you really don't want to be up the mountain overnight). There are also a lot of very nice retro touches - it all feels very well researched. It's also very sympathetically shot for what is obviously a sensitive subject - the ongoing roll-call of the dead is very nicely done and brings out the humanity well. But...

...it's two and a half hours! There is no way it needed to be that long - a simple precis is "the plane crashes. things get grim. things get even grimmer. they start eating the dead (yes, it's a spoiler, but this was 52 years ago now!). things are still grim. but almost impossibly, some stay alive long enough to get rescued". Yes, there are plenty of philosophical points to be explored, but they could have been done so slightly more succinctly and I think we'd have got the point. If it wasn't a true story, you'd find it all very hard to believe - I suspect I'd struggle to survive 72 days anywhere in an aeroplane, let alone in one halfway up a mountain. So it's a very impressive story, but the grimness is unrelenting (until right at the end, obviously) and the pace really doesn't help.

The acting is an interesting one because everyone involved does a good job, but the ensemble nature of the (generally mostly unknown, but totally unknown by me) cast and the dehumanising and claustrophobic nature of the environment makes it really difficult (for me, at least) to call out any one person in particular. Enzo Vogrincic does deserve a namecheck as Numa Turcatti for his narration of the film which is done in an dispassionate "wise after the event" style, which works really well. It is a nice touch though to have Carlos Paez, who is an actual survivor of the disaster, play his own father hearing of his survival.

J. A. Bayona (A Monster Calls, Jurassic World: A Fallen Kingdom, LOTR: The Rings Of Power) has done a great job here - partly for his direction and partly for getting the thing made at all. It looks expensive and must have been a difficult sell, both for the technical difficulties involved and the fact that it's in Spanish. Wikipedia also tells me that they had difficulties with a lack of snow and, when they did find some, it was the wrong colour due to Saharan dust. Oh, the irony.

There's a lot to love about this film - it's an impressive achievement (not least its mere existence), is well written and features some fine (and surprisingly believable, for such an incredible scenario) acting and some terrific shots. But it just didn't need to be as long as it was - it should have been a maximum two hours and ninety minutes would also have been just fine. Even so, it's still a far more enjoyable watch than some of the absolute nonsense on The Guardian's list. If you want to watch it, it's a Netflix film - so you can probably guess where you might find it.

2022 - Another year end
#19 - A great film that I couldn't handle watching