The Snow Circle confirms that there is an outstanding filmmaker in Juan Antonio Bayona to film the disaster. Of The Impossible in 2012, story of a family separated by the tsunami which took place in Thailand on December 26, 2004, in A few minutes after midnight in 2016, a heartbreaking drama with a child facing his mother’s incurable illness as the hero, the Spanish filmmaker seems to have found the recipe for telling moving stories without requiring the proper functioning of our tear systems.
How is it ? How does it manage, even on our small televisions, to plunge us so viscerally into the heart of devastation? At the origins of Snow Circle, there is a stunning story that marked its time. That of a plane crash, in October 1972, with a Uruguayan rugby team on board seeking to go to Chile to play a match. Lost in the middle of the Andes, the injured or very weakened survivors find themselves fighting against the hostility of the elements: the freezing cold to begin with, to which are quickly added the lack of resources and a mental health that is deteriorating. drifts as the days pass and the hope of being rescued or simply found fades.
Juan Antonio Bayona spares the viewer nothing, neither from the violence of the crash nor from this forced and grueling apprenticeship with wild nature. He will see all of these bodies crushed by the incredible brutality of the accident, will hear the cries of pain and the deafening blast of the mountain wind in the night which threatens to freeze the still living passengers in place. As in The Impossible, The Snow Circle pushes the graphic representation of the disaster very far, even if it means bordering on the fantastic.
Coming from horror cinema with his first film The orphanage in 2007, the director transformed the experience of this astonishing true story into a horrific tale made up of bodies emerging from piles of snow, skins which blackened and rotted, and eyes blackened by hunger and despair which lost their footing with them. reality. But this encounter between a terrifying reality and genre cinema does not result here, as can often happen, in a voyeuristic or complacent film. There is in Juan Antonio Bayona an obvious respect for the story he tells and his characters, but even more a desire to transcribe their dilemmas with the greatest possible intelligence.
