I was under the impression that this was a documentary about the ill-fated Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 and so was blown away that it’s a dramatic reenactment with best in class production values. Everything else about the film is on point as well, the acting, how it handles cannibalism, how the survivors struggle to make sense of it all. It’s only the latest in a long line of adaptations about this disaster but it might be the most authentic one yet with its use of Uruguayan and Argentine actors.

In 1972, a chartered plane is meant to take am Uruguayan rugby football team and some of their friends to a match in Santiago, Chile. The youths look forward to a once in a lifetime trip before they begin their adult lives. As the plane is crossing the Andes mountains however, it strikes a glacier and breaks apart into two sections. Those in the tail section are killed almost immediately. The pilots are crushed and several more in the front section are thrown out of the plane or die of injuries. About thirty survive the crash and are initially hopeful for a quick rescue as they can hear and even see rescue aircraft searching for them. Hope turns to despair when they realize that the would be rescuers are unable to see the crash site from the air. They later hear the news on the radio that after eight days of fruitless searching, rescue efforts are being stopped until the snow melts in the summer. With little food on the aircraft, the survivors soon begin starving and reluctantly make the decision to consume the flesh of the dead in order to live.

Many viewers report that the horrific crash scene is enough to put them off flying and no wonder. The graphic depictions of deaths and injuries ram home the realization that an aircraft is just a fragile metal shell. One moment the passengers are ribbing each other about turbulence and the next the forces grow powerful enough to throw them around like bowling pins. Then after they’ve had time to count the dead and stabilize the injured, they’re forced to confront the reality that they’re trapped in one of the most isolated and inhospitable places on Earth. There’s nothing but snow and rock around them and they’re hemmed in by daunting peaks and slopes. It’s just disaster upon disaster heaped on top of them, and as far as I can tell from reports of the real event, this makes for a reasonably accurate account. All that and we haven’t even started on the horror and psychological turmoil from being forced to choose between eating the flesh of the people you know and slowly dying as your own body consumes itself. This is legitimately one of the most effective horror movies I’ve seen in a while.

One interesting choice they made in this adaptation is to have the narrator be Numa Turcatti. It’s a spoiler but not much of one as this is history to say that contrary to expectations, Numa isn’t one of the survivors. One reason for doing this might be to introduce a dramatic twist to a well-known story. The director J. A. Bayona claims that he wanted to focus some attention to those who didn’t make it. Both could be true and certainly this helps to crystallize the spirituality of the film. He was the last of them to die and the implication is that it was his flesh which gave the rest the strength to send an expedition out to seek help. In this telling, he was one of the last to agree to consume human flesh and so acts as a sort of moral center for the group despite not being one of the team members and barely knowing the other passengers. It feels unreal that the survivors all worked together so well under such desperate conditions, yet this was indeed what happened. If anything, this account understates how much it was a group effort as they even rationed the human flesh and made a decision to give more to those sent out on the expedition.

As a survival drama, this is constrained by its genre and the need to be respectful to all of the real people involved so it’s not exactly breaking new artistic grounds. But it is, as I said, perhaps the best air disaster film yet made and a wonderful depiction of the power of the human spirit that doesn’t feel cringey. That earns it a strong recommendation from me.