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. 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.
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. 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.
