Society of the Snow is about the so-called Miracle of the Andes. On October 13, 1972, a plane with 45 passengers departed from Uruguay en route to Santiago, Chile, and collided with a mountain ridge in the Andes. Authorities did not discover the 16 survivors until ten weeks later. Although many members of the Old Christians rugby team on the flight would attribute their survival to a “miracle,” watching the film, it doesn’t seem like an extraordinary phenomenon inexplicable by natural or scientific laws. Instead, the survivors relied on their ingenuity, perseverance, and sheer luck, not to mention their choice to eat their dead. Fortunately, director J.A. Bayona—who’s no stranger to disaster movies after The Impossible (2012), about a family who survives the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami—doesn’t present what happened through the religious lens of a miracle. Despite Bayona’s sometimes distractingly flashy camerawork, he gives the viewer a sense of authenticity and emotional immediacy about what happened.

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