This is one of the most media accidents of all time: the crash of the flight Fuerza Aérea Uruguaya 571, carrying the Uruguayan rugby team, in the middle of the Andes. Already several times adapted to cinema, this time it is Spanish Juan Antonio Bayona (Orphanship, A few minutes after midnight...) which sticks to it for a film of nearly 2h30 to Netflix : The Snow Circle. So what's this big start-of-year release worth? Answer to read below...
The Sucked Diverse
In October 1972, the national rugby team embarked with some relatives on the Fuerza Aérea flight Uruguaya 571 chartered by the army to go play a game in Chile. As their plane flies over the Andes, they will crash in the middle of the mountains in one of the most hostile territories on the planet. Then begins a survival race for the survivors, while the rest of the world believes them all dead...
If in the writing of this short summary we have avoided spoiling everything, there is much to bet that you already know this story. Perhaps you have already heard the organ points of this horrific fact-diversity that shook the world in the early 1970s. It must be said that the media impact of history was subsequently sustained by several consecutive releases: The Snow Circle is indeed the fifth sticky adaptation to the drama of Vol 571! And already back then, Survivors (1993) of Frank Marshall (including Ethan Hawke and Josh Hamilton) had some international impact... So what does Bayona come to do to entangle in this fact-various seen and reviewed that everyone knows?
Intimate horror
First, Bayona will be inspired by another book (The Nieve Society of Uruguayan journalist Pablo Vierci who personally knew many of the victims of the crash) for his Snow circle. Thus the story tightens, the horror becomes intimate, and which better than Bayona to narrate this story whose original title (literally The Snow Society) does much better account of the reality of the feature than its francophone counterpart ? Because that's what it's about: how can a group of human beings form a society in an environment hostile to extreme and bathed in unspeakable horror?
In the mountains, no one will hear you screaming
This reference to Alien Maybe it's not that anomaly, since in The Snow Circle genre cinema is never far away. Bayona carries with him his horror cinema passive (Orphanship who made him known, Minutes after midnight, etc.) to set several shots that scream their love of the genre. Slightly debunked shots of hands sipping out of the snow following an avalanche that is irremediably drawn from the zombie film to the scene in the high mountain, razing light, where characters emerging from a snow cocoon lead to think of the transformation cinema, fear is never formally far away. But besides these pure visual references, The Snow Circle a real desire to take the viewer to the tripe. You will see the most stressful aerial crash scene that the cinema has offered you since beautiful lurette, while a palpable tension crosses the entire feature film.
Yet, within this logic of thriller masturbated with horrific visual codes, Bayona makes the first paradoxical choice of keeping a pudic distance with all the gore projections that the narrative could easily have brought to her. A constant distance, particularly well balanced and respectful of those who have actually experienced this drama (several survivors attended the screening of the film), thus allowing the viewer a direct empathy with his wide gallery of characters. This dual movement (tension/retention) allows the staging to dialogue with the background of the film, which tells nothing but an indefensible story, both tragic and miraculous. Tragedy or miracle? The Snow Circle makes this lameness its narrative force, will constantly question the spectator as much on his own look as on this new society which, lethargic, is set up around the demantibulated carcass of the plane.
And if we talk about empathy, a doubly risky choice (promotionally but also practically) of the director allows the audience to slip a little better into the ranks of survivors: casting is made up of only new heads. Novice, Uruguayan and Argentine actors, who allow Bayona to keep her characters at the same height compared to each other, but also to support a little more the suspension of the unbelief of a spectator already doubtlessly stunned by the first thirty minutes of the Snow circle. A particularly motivated casting, which had to fast on much of the shooting to follow, day after day, the physical transformation of the crash survivors.
The impossible does-various
In short, a risky bet for Bayona (who had already tried to transcribe a real catastrophe with The Impossible), and bet raised hands. Besides a length (2h30) that we never notice passing, it reaches with The Snow Circle maintain the dangerous balance between emotion and voyeurism, pathos and tears. Undoubtedly, one of the great films of the beginning of the year and above all a brilliant rereading of a fact-divers that it would have thought was exhausted to the marrow.
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