#Netflix aftermath real story movie

Some of the men take the decision to cut up the corpses out of sight of the others, and so for a while become themselves complex figures: part priests and part untouchables. Dead bodies are preserved in the icy temperatures and the awful decision has to be made, at first more agonising because many suspect that rescue is surely only days away: how will it look if some refused this loathsome, greedy desecration and some didn’t? Bayona shows us a kind of schismatic disagreement, between the people who detested the idea and those who accepted it – and also between the people who were eaten without their permission and those who emotionally gave this permission in advance, like organ donors.Īt any rate, no help arrives and there is no nobility in just starving to death. There is the terrible crash drinking water is not a problem because of the snow, but gnawing hunger sets in. We begin with a rugby match, with teasingly ambiguous hints about their behaviour under pressure. And there is a tonal issue, in life as in art: is there an element of horror in this story which can’t quite be acknowledged? Bayona himself has directed a scary movie, The Orphanage, and an emotional story of survival, The Impossible, so he is maybe uniquely qualified to take this on.īayona hits a strong, clear storytelling stride right away: the passengers were rugby players heading to a game in Chile with friends and family.

#Netflix aftermath real story movie

Perhaps no movie about this extraordinary case can quite encompass what in some ways is its most poignant part: the aftermath, as the nation’s joy was complicated when the (initially withheld) news about cannibalism leaked out. It is based on the book of the same name by Uruguayan journalist Pablo Vierci and not (or only indirectly) taken from Piers Paul Read’s pioneering 1974 classic Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors which popularised the idea that their cannibalism had become a kind of mysterious secular Eucharist, eating the blood and body of one’s fellow human beings to stave off death, in a profound spirit of fellowship and love. The story of the 1972 Uruguayan air crash in the remote Andes, and the ordeal of the survivors who resorted to cannibalism, is powerfully retold in this movie from Spanish director JA Bayona.