3:11:24

Society of the Snow, 2023. It’s interesting the way people (in this case, the film’s director, J. A. Bayona, who is discussing the making of the movie) often talk about the digital and CGI—with implicit distrust—and yet: our world is ruled by the digital. By simulation, illusion, and fakery.

I have always been obsessed with the story of the Christian Uruguayan Rugby team that crashed in the Andes in 1972. I read the book, Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors in high school, and saw the 1993 film when it came out. I had no idea they made a remake last year, Society of the Snow, by Spanish filmmaker J. A. Bayona, whose film Orphanage I liked a lot when it came out. Spanish films, especially in the late 90s and early aughts (like Alejandro Amenábar’s Tesis and Open Your Eyes; Julio Medem’s Lover’s of Arctic Circle and Sex and Lucia—his later films are awful; I never liked Almodovor), were some of my favorite contemporary films. Society of the Snow is about the power and beauty of the Divine Masculine. The film is full of divine masculine love, loyalty, and integrity. Incredible tenderness and strength. It can teach us a tremendous amount about what physical and spiritual endurance really looks like. What the survival of trauma really looks like. I was so overwhelmed by the movie—I could barely make it through the plane crash scene. I felt it so viscerally I had to pause it once or twice. I immediately started crying, shaking. Then I couldn’t sleep. I was so affected by what these people had to endure—unimaginable, even when it is shown. And impossible. Impossible. The performances, by mostly unknowns, are astonishing, and puts all American/Hollywood actors to shame. Above all, it is a film about being deeply human. The sacred and courageous power of being deeply human.