Spoiler Alert
Over the course of the film, more and more passengers begin to succumb to the elements and injury, but you are never desensitised to the death. The film honours each of the fallen by displaying their full name and age on screen when they breathe their last. There is an endearing moment at the end of the film when the survivors awkwardly attempt to groom themselves with what little resources they have so they can look presentable when the rescuers arrive. And when the music swells and the helicopters are finally in sight, you’d be hard pressed not to cheer along with them. We also see that the survivors have carefully preserved mementoes of their dead companions.
From beginning to end, Society of the Snow is narrated by the gentle Numa (Enzo Vogrincic), who was not a part of the rugby team but persuaded by his friends to join the trip at the last minute. Where the other passengers constitute the brain and the brawn of the crew, Numa is the heart. He becomes a beacon of hope and strength for the other passengers, often looking out for them at the cost of his own well-being. If no one else, you are convinced that this is the one character who must have survived to the end. And so it comes as a huge shock when Numa dies of infection with 40 minutes of the film still left. It turns out that Numa is the last person in the group to die. His death provides the impetus for his companions to embark on a perilous expedition to Chile, where they finally get help. Since he was not among the final survivors, Numa barely featured in the 1993 film Alive, which was also based on the 1972 plane crash. Society of the Snow, on the other hand, makes a point of paying tribute to Numa’s sacrifice. He dies clutching a piece of paper in his hand that reads: “There is no greater love than to give one’s life for friends.”
Despite a tremendous homecoming, the survivors don’t feel like they’re heroes; “because they were dead like us, and only they got to come back home,” narrates Numa. Their faces are hard and blackened by prolonged exposure to the punishing cold (the film has also been nominated for the Best Makeup and Hairstyling Oscar), their bodies are skeletal and covered in grime, and they shiver even when it’s no longer cold. But they are alive, overwhelmingly so, and determined to keep the stories of their companions alive. “Keep taking care of each other,” says Numa in his parting narration. “And tell everyone what we did on the mountain.” In honouring every single individual who was on that flight, that’s exactly what Society of the Snow does.