On October 13, 1972, 45 people took off in a plane from Montevideo, Uruguay. Their intended destination: Santiago, Chile. But as the plane carrying a Uruguayan rugby team crossed the Andean Mountain Range, bad weather and poor visibility led to the plane clipping a ridge and crashing there.
In the end, when survivors were rescued 72 days later, 16 people were left. But were it not for their resilience and for difficult decisions, there may not have been anyone left at all.
Society of the Snow depicts the story of the people who boarded that flight. It shows how they endured blizzards, avalanches, starvation and worse. And it chronicles the reluctant, horrifying choice the survivors eventually made as they ran out of food: eating those who died waiting for rescue.
Many of the survivors immediately begin working together to take care of the wounded and create things that will help them survive their ordeal. Most of them are college athletes, and they work to be strong for each other. A couple of them are medical students, and they use their knowledge in order to help treat others as best as they can. Survivors such as Marcelo Pérez del Castillo and Fernando “Nando” Parrado, emerge as leaders to the group and attempt to keep group morale high.
The issue of cannibalism is, of course, at the center of this well-known story. This depiction of it does not treat that horrible choice lightly. The survivors spend a couple of days without food debating whether they should even consider eating the bodies of those who’ve already died. And they attempt to eat anything else they can find, from cigarettes to shoestrings.
Eventually, they realize that they’re out of options if they want to survive, and a group of them reluctantly decide to consume the dead, with two people volunteering to chop up the bodies so no one else will have to go through that trauma or have to think about who it is they’re eating. It’s also a choice that some in the group make only after hearing over their radio that the search for them has been called off. While cannibalism is, obviously, a terrible choice for anyone to contemplate, the film certainly reveals that it wasn’t a choice anyone of the survivors of the plane crash took lightly. Indeed, they desperately tried to avoid that decision.
Nando and fellow survivor Roberto Canessa risk their lives crossing the Andes in order to reach Chile and get rescue. Others likewise put their lives on the line attempting to help their situation. Even in moments where everything seems lost, the desperate survivors cling to hope and encourage one another to do the same.
Many of the passengers are shown to be Roman Catholic. Indeed, the rugby club is the Old Christians Club. We see them attending Mass, where the priest weaves together Luke 4’s account of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness by the devil with Luke 22’s account of Him instituting the Lord’s Supper. The former passage references Jesus being hungry in the wilderness, and it explains that man shall not live by bread alone. The latter passage includes Jesus’ words, “This is My body, which is given for you.”
That Scripture reading obviously foreshadows how the hungry passengers will literally sustain themselves on the flesh of those who died in the crash.
But that last part is difficult for some of the survivors to swallow—literally and figuratively. One of those people is Numa, who wonders what God, in His sovereignty, might have intended by allowing the deaths of so many friends and teammates. But another survivor, Javier, tells Numa that the experience has made him realize that his purpose is to return home to his family and to provide them with the love they deserve—a love that’s reignited in him when his wife passes away on the mountain.
Another person, Arturo, says that he doesn’t believe in God anymore, saying, “God doesn’t tell me what to do on the mountain.” Instead, he says that the fuselage wreckage is his heaven, and he believes in the “god” of perseverance—the one he sees when the other survivors continue pressing on against hardship.
The faith of many survivors makes the specter of cannibalism extremely difficult for them, and they debate it for some time.
“Will God forgive us?” one person asks.
“God put us in this situation; He’ll understand we need to do anything to survive,” another responds. Arturo, for his part, says God doesn’t have anything to do with it. Eventually, the passengers do resort to eating the flesh of deceased passengers, giving each other consent to eat their own bodies if they perish, too. And when one of them does die, they find a note on his body citing John 15:13: “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.”
People recite the Lord’s Prayer and pray the Catholic Rosary. A radio plays “Ave Maria.” Survivors pray to God that He would protect them at various moments. Someone else prays that God would let him see his family one last time. Someone crosses himself.
The movie suggests that the meaning of the crash is ultimately subjective, something that viewers will need to decide for themselves, such as, “The answer is in you.”
A man’s genitals are seen, and the rears of other men are seen. Another man is seen in his underwear. We hear a verbal reference to breasts. A man jokes that another man’s girlfriend is nearby wearing a bikini.
When the plane crashes, the violence gets pretty intense. Some people are sucked out of the back of the plane as the tail section detaches. And when the crash causes the plane’s seats to dislodge from the floor, other passengers are crushed, their legs snapping in horrible ways. One person gets impaled by a piece of metal, and a woman’s neck is crushed by another bit of metal. Some people are seen heavily bleeding, and one man’s knee is popped back into place by a medical student.
Some people are buried by an avalanche and suffocate. Others pass away from their wounds throughout the film. Someone cuts his hand.
And when the food runs out, the survivors make the difficult decision to begin cutting up and eating the flesh of those who died before. The process is mostly offscreen, though we do see the passengers eating small bits of meat. Additionally, we see a bony hand and a ribcage, stripped of flesh. Bodies are removed from the plane and piled up. Other bodies are found, frozen in the snow.
Characters use the f-word and the s-word once each (in English overdubs). “A–” is used twice, and someone uses the word “t-tties.” God’s name is taken in vain three times.
People drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes.
Someone vomits. Survivors urinate. One does so on his hands to keep warm, and another passes black urine onto the snow.
Society of the Snow is not an easy movie, nor is it meant to be.
For two-and-a-half hours, the film chronicles into the “Miracle of the Andes.” It hides no difficulty—physical, emotional or moral. Every challenge the survivors face, we face vicariously, too. And even as the credits roll, the movie reminds us that the events depicted spanned a staggering 72 days.
This drama explores many topics: resilience in the face of overwhelming tragedy; spiritual questions about meaning; and moral issues surrounding cannibalism and survival.
But while the film is well made, the story of tragedy and courage it tells is nonetheless difficult to endure.
Kennedy Unthank studied journalism at the University of Missouri. He knew he wanted to write for a living when he won a contest for “best fantasy story” while in the 4th grade. What he didn’t know at the time, however, was that he was the only person to submit a story. Regardless, the seed was planted. Kennedy collects and plays board games in his free time, and he loves to talk about biblical apologetics. He thinks the ending of Lost “wasn’t that bad.”
