Society of the Snow

I know there have been many versions of the story told in this movie, but I haven't read or seen any of them, so this was all fresh to me.

This is not a movie I think I would ever want to watch again. The word "grueling" was pretty much invented to describe the experience of watching this film. But damn is this riveting, even if in a kind of morbid way. It's also a dazzling technical achievement, one of those films where the effects are so seamless you can't always tell what's special effects and what's real.

"Society of the Snow" is not primarily a character-driven film, yet I was impressed by how much I came to know and like all of the characters in this despite the fact that only two or three are given the majority of screen time. At first, I didn't even know who was who and only knew they had names because their character's name would be listed before their line of dialogue in the subtitles. But by the time the film was over I felt like a knew all of them and cared about them deeply.

This movie does a great job of showing the capacity humans have for normalizing behavior that in other circumstances would be unthinkable.

One of my favorite movies of the year.

Grade: A.