Original title: La sociedad de la nieve
English title: Society of the Snow
Director: J. A. Bayona
Year: 2023
Country: Spain / Uruguay
Duration: 144 min
Language: Spanish
Platform: Netflix
Source: Based on the real story of the 1972 Andes flight disaster and the book by Pablo Vierci

Society of the Snow positions itself on a threshold that the film neither thematizes nor explicitly frames as an object of reflection. It does not declare it, does not turn it into a concept, and does not use it as an interpretive key. It crosses it and sustains it. This is not a film about hunger, nor about death. It is a film about the structural distance between what can be represented and what remains off screen, between what can be said and what can only be listened to or held. It is not concerned with the act of surviving, but with the condition of survival, understood as an unstable moral space in which the body continues to exist while every symbolic order collapses.

The choice of the narrating voice is central to this configuration. The voice belongs to Numa Turcatti, who is not among the survivors. He does not speak from a pacified beyond, nor from a position of retrospective omniscience. He does not organize the story as if its outcome were already known. He accompanies. He speaks from within the time of the event, not from its conclusion. His voice does not explain or interpret. It holds things together. It does not introduce a memorial distance, but continuity. In this sense, it is a posthumous voice in the most rigorous sense of the term, not as a ghost, but as a presence that persists. Through this voice, the dead are not transformed into the past. They remain.

The film is constructed according to a logic of retention. It does not fill, compensate, or complete. The words are few, but not impoverished. The editing is silent, not because sound is absent, but because saturation is absent. Time itself becomes silence. Not a silence that mutes, but a silence that holds. It sustains duration without immediately translating it into meaning. Pain finds no space in emphasis, but in suspension. Trauma does not take shape through explanation, but through persistence. Silence does not function as emptiness, but as density. Not as absence, but as a full temporal regime.

One of the film’s simplest and most radical gestures is that of gathering. Objects that belonged to the dead are taken, ordered, and prepared to be returned to their families. There is no commentary, no narrative emphasis, no explicit symbolic function. There is the gesture itself. Holding a shoe, a photograph, a watch, and recognizing their weight. Not as compensation, but as restitution. The film does not assign this gesture a reparative function. It does not promise healing. It accompanies. Mourning is not treated as a process leading to closure, but as a practice that continues over time.

Trauma is never staged as spectacle. The directorial choice is unequivocal. No body is shown at the moment of violence, and nothing graphic is visualized. Visibility is not assumed as a criterion of truth. The body never becomes an object of visual consumption. Horror is not aestheticized. Hunger is not a theme, but a threshold. Survival is not heroic. It is a morally complex condition that the film neither simplifies nor redeems. The questions remain open, without being resolved or ordered into a narrative progression.

The body, in Society of the Snow, is never a resource. It is not a function, nor a symbol. No presence is reduced, and no body is transformed into a means. The body is duration and relation. Survival does not erase the value of the dead. It reaffirms it. The film thus assumes a precise ethical position: to narrate without making hell acceptable, without smoothing its edges, and without turning memory into a moral lesson.

The presence of the real survivors follows the same logic. Fernando Parrado, Roberto Canessa, and Carlos Páez do not appear as markers of authenticity or nostalgic references. Their presence does not certify the real. It shares it. The moment in which Páez reads the names of those who returned is not a sentimental gesture. It is a transfer of responsibility. The film does not appropriate their story. It exposes itself alongside them.

A discreet and rigorous formal gesture structures the entire film. Every time a character dies, his name appears on screen. Not at the end, not in a concluding list, and not separated from the narrative. The name emerges at the very moment of loss. This gesture does not distinguish between narration and memory. It intertwines them. The film does not postpone remembrance. It remembers while it tells. Each name becomes a mark inscribed in the time of the narrative. A memorial in act, not retrospective.

The question of mourning runs through the film without being thematized as an abstract problem. Who has the right to be mourned. Who is recognized as a loss. Society of the Snow does not hierarchize pain, does not construct exemplary figures, and does not establish a pantheon. Every body is acknowledged, and every absence is recorded. Recognition is not vertical, but horizontal.

This formal configuration produces a precise position for the viewer. The film does not ask for empathy. It asks for presence. The full silence, the uncompensated duration, and the sparseness of language prevent the viewer from occupying a position of interpretive safety. The viewer is neither guided nor protected. They are compelled to remain, sharing a time that does not explain and does not console.

In this sense, the film makes it impossible to inhabit silence as lack without reducing it to explanation. Silence cannot be transformed into emptiness without betraying the ethical function of the work. If it were filled, if it became a dramatic pause or a narrative preparation, the dispositif would break. It is in sustaining this silence that the film anchors its necessity.

Society of the Snow does not ask for emotional participation. It asks for attention. It does not construct an empathic device, but an ethical one. It does not use the viewer. It implicates them. In this measured gesture, free of emphasis, the film constructs a form of cinema that does not explain, does not console, and does not judge. It accompanies. And it leaves space.

Bibliography

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L’entretien infini. Gallimard, 1969.
Le pas au-delà. Gallimard, 1973.

Butler, Judith
Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2004.
Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? Verso, 2009.

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Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Didi-Huberman, Georges
Quand les images prennent position. Éditions de Minuit, 2009.
Images malgré tout. Éditions de Minuit, 2003.

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The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century. Harvard University Press, 2002.

Levi, Primo
I sommersi e i salvati. Einaudi, 1986.