No film could fully capture the awfulness of this experience. But despite some of Bayona’s irksome flair, Society of the Snow does a sturdy enough job getting the point across.

Bayona’s approach to the “triumph of the human spirit” arc — often a broad, four-quadrant, feel-good cinematic flattening of real events — is both scrutinous and rigorous. It turns the concept inside out, presenting the ordeal of 571’s survivors as a murky scenario that we’ve been granted secret, intimate access to.

A welcome innovation is the foregrounding of the dead; previous iterations have focused only on the survivors. The casting of mostly unknown Argentine and Uruaguarn actors adds to the novelty, as does the film’s compelling depiction of survivors’ guilt after the “Heroes of the Andes” return to their home country.