‘Society of the Snow’: Inside the Harrowing True Story of a Plane Crash That Led to Cannibalism

Sometimes, when you get home after a long day, there's nothing you want to do more than plop on the couch and watch ... a group of people suffer unfathomable torment in the most graphic and emotionally disturbing way?

Gee, when put like that, one wonders who in their right mind would stream Society of the Snow, Spain's submission to this year's Oscars and the latest true-life disaster picture from J.A. Bayona (The Impossible). But this depressing motion picture is streaming now on Netflix, and considering how much interest there's been in the shocking 1972 story of the Uruguayan rugby team trapped in the Andes over the years, you may just find yourself tuning in.

Yes, this is the tale about the 45 passengers and crew — 19 young members of Montevideo's "Old Christians" amateur rugby club, several coaches, family members and boosters — who chartered a plane to fly to Santiago, Chile and crashed at a high altitude where no man or beast was meant to survive, in a snow-white valley too bright and too broad to ever get spotted by rescue planes.

But survive many (well, a few) did after a very long struggle of over 70 days that included dangerous reconnaissance missions, an avalanche or two, fevers, infections and general misery. How did they survive? You're going to make me say it, aren't you? They survived by eating the dead, most of whom were their friends. It's an unfathomable story.

And that's why it's been the subject of several books (the first being Piers Paul Read's Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors), a host of Discovery Channel-type documentaries and a 1993 feature film (Alive) directed by Frank Marshall and starring such notable Uruguayan actors as Ethan Hawke, Josh Hamilton, Illeana Douglas and Vincent Spano.

That older film was a little hit-or-miss, casting issues aside. The initial plane crash is harrowing, as is the general "what the hell am I watching?" roll-out of the story, but it got way too Hollywood in its triumph of the human spirit conclusion.

Bayona's version (apart from having actual Latin American actors speaking Spanish) is considerably more measured in its finale and is also a far bigger gross-out once it becomes chow time.

The disaster sequences in the movie really grab you by the throat, but I can't say that all of the drama really works, nor do you really get to know the characters on an individual basis. (For the most part, they are a group of interchangeable freezing people undergoing unbearable suffering as opposed to characters.) There are also some howlingly bad scenes of people just barfing out paragraphs of exposition.

But it's only human nature to want to stop and look at this thing. And when you do, we've anticipated some questions you might have.

Were the events of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 really as harrowing as depicted in Society of the Snow?

No, no, of course not.

Oh, that's good.

They were much, much worse.

Ay Dios mío!

Yeah, sorry. What you see in the movie is the initial crash, severing the plane in two, with some poor souls getting sucked out the back to their doom. It is implied that those who did were killed immediately, but in reality, one person, 18-year-old Carlos Valeta, somehow survived the fall, then walked around in the snow trying to reach the rest of the plane, but eventually died alone on the mountain.

Weirdly, the actual plane crash part of this story is scarier in the older film Alive than in the brand new Society of the Snow.

Another really gruesome detail this movie leaves out is that directly after the crash, some of survivors had more than just broken bones but, in one case, part of their stomach hanging out. Though Society of the Snow is much more brutal and fierce, Alive kinda has it beat for showing that first night, with people smashed up in accordion-ed seats, howling in pain until they ultimately died.

I have to imagine that the use of the dead as nourishment was a lot more intense than you see in the movies.

Society of the Snow gets into it a lot more than Alive does, and even with those horrific shots of frozen "meat" thawing in the sun and that shot of eating with some out-of-focus ribs in the foreground — it doesn't come close to reality. (That moment when they are posing for the camera and they quickly half-cover up some entrails? It is based on this picture. You'll notice the human spine picked clean off to the right, and down by the feet are the covered-up innards. Excuse me, I am going to throw up.)

At first, the survivors only ate fat and muscle. By the end, they ate everything — brains, organs, you name it. They made a point not to eat their own relatives (this distinction comes up more in Alive than Society) but had the rescue come much later, they would have had to make a decision about that. Given the momentum by that point, there is much to suggest they would have crossed that line, too. (That conclusion is derived from the original book Alive.)

Society touches on the Roman Catholic angle that has been much discussed in later years, how the survivors rationalized their actions by considering eating their fallen comrades akin to the Eucharist. In reality, they often said prayers before eating as if they were taking communion.

They also didn't just eat the dead; they used flesh from the bodies to patch up their shoes and clothing. It is all very unpleasant, and even though you can understand it intellectually, it would be hard to show all of this in a movie and still present these people as heroes. Society of the Snow goes just as far as it can.

What else did the movie leave out?

Society of the Snow goes heavy on the brotherhood of man angle. It's right there in the title and in Bayona's decision to have the film narrated by the last comrade to sacrifice himself. Read's book Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors suggests that there was much more tribalism and a Lord of the Flies-esque class structure based on whose decisions bore the most fruit and sheer Darwinian strength. It's a little less rosy of a story. But many of the books that have come out since Alive, including those written by the survivors themselves, have downplayed Read's nastier narrative.

Did the survivors immediately explain how they survived?

Today, the survivors say they have no regrets of doing what they had to do to live — and much of Society's whole thesis is about sacrificing yourself for your friends. (Once cannibalism was on the table, many of the living gave permission to use their bodies for meat should they end up dying — and, indeed, it did play out that way in some cases.)

But at first, they (understandably!) tried to keep this to themselves. In time, the story leaked, especially after rumors spread that the survivors may have killed some of the others for food. (The news was initially suppressed in Uruguay.) There was some backlash at first, but the survivors were officially absolved by a priest, who agreed with their (for lack of a better term) Eucharist defense.

It is the cannibalism aspect, surely, that has made this such a famous story—and also the subject of so many tasteless jokes over the years. (It's not on YouTube, but Gilbert Gottfried has a whole routine about this; now that I've watched Society of the Snow, I feel incredibly guilty for once laughing.)

Did the survivors really hear that the rescue attempts had been called off on the portable radio?

If you can imagine such a cruel thing, yes, they did. This moment of absolute despair is one of the bleakest things in Society of the Snow. However, according to Read's Alive, after the initial panic, Coco (who later died in the avalanche) used that moment to rally everyone and say now we will be the ones to save ourselves.

Was there an unbelievable womp-womp to this?

Yes! And it is not mentioned in Society of the Snow.

We see how hard it was for Nando and Roberto to make the western trek into Chile with makeshift gear. (The movie also skips over that the farmer they meet kinda buzzed off at first but then came back the next day.) They climbed and walked 38 miles over 10 grueling days in the logical direction, but had they gone east ... there was actually an abandoned hotel just 13 miles away! It contained maps, canned food, firewood and hot springs, as well as a lower altitude, requiring them to eat less.

If they had all gone there before the avalanche, well ... if, if, if, right? Thinking like that is not going to help anyone survive on top of the Andes Mountains. A destination, by the way, I have no intention of ever visiting!