In 2007, Spanish filmmaker J.A. Bayona made an stunning feature debut with the intensely stylish and spooky ghost story “The Orphanage.” Between then and now, Bayona has done some great work, most notably “The Impossible” (2012), a real-life disaster movie starring an Academy Award-nominated Naomi Watts. Now he has turned his attention to the story of the mostly 20-something members of a Uruguayan rugby team who survive a plane crash in the Andes, but are stranded on a stormy glacier with nothing to eat for 72 days except their dead fellow passengers, who are mostly friends and relatives.

Bayona came across the 2009 book “La sociedad de la nieve” by Pablo Vierci while making “The Impossible.” The author is a childhood friend of some of the survivors. No doubt using his reputation as leverage, Bayona got Netflix to bankroll this first-rate production. The result goes to the heart of cinema. “Society of the Snow,” which was shot in Andalusia, Spain among other locations, is the story of humans driven by desperation to do the unthinkable.

The film puts us aboard the twin-engine Fairchild 571 as it crashes and rips apart high up in the Andes, spilling debris and passengers alike to the rocky mountaintops below. The film transports us to the other-worldly site of the crash, where the survivors bury the dead in the snow and cling to one another in the sub-zero fuselage. Numa Turcatti (the charismatic, Adam Driver look-alike Enzo Vogrincic Roldan), a rugby player planning to attend law school, is our “other self,” the character we most connect with. He is courageous, a natural leader, perhaps even saintly. At first, he refuses the “meat” offered to him by players who are medical students. Armed with shards of glass, these young men strip the corpses of flesh, rendering it in a form not obviously human. No one gnaws on a leg. Bayona spares us some images, but shows us enough.

The dead are sacred to those that they keep alive. In Piers Paul Read’s 1974 book “Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors,” the author makes a connection between the players’ devout Catholic faith and the sacrament of Communion and their decision to eat the remains in order to stay alive.

Before the flight, we see several members of the team, soon to be headed to Chile, in church. The priest’s sermon is about the temptation of Jesus and how while fasting in the desert, Jesus was approached by “the Tempter,” who mocked him, suggesting that he “turn stones to loaves.” Bayona puts us inside that fuselage, surrounded by windswept, snow-covered peaks suffering relentless pain, hunger and cold. We accompany volunteers who march out into the snowy wasteland in search of the plane’s tail. Disaster strikes, heartlessly reducing the number of survivors, again.

Films about the Andes survivors have been made before. But “Society of the Snow” is the most authentic and realistic. It depicts life in extremis, a story of humans enduring a crucible-like trial that transforms them physically and spiritually. One survivor wears religious medals removed from the dead: a bone necklace. “Society of the Snow” is in some ways another “Lord of the Flies,” except it is too cold for flies. The “trial” that the survivors experience is life itself condensed to an almost unbearable essence. Many of the young Uruguayan and Argentine actors in the cast are newcomers. But the ensemble is superb. Containing elements of the real-life Shackleton Expedition and the Robert Aldrich 1965 fiction classic “The Flight of the Phoenix,” “Society of the Snow” joins the ranks of the greatest survival stories ever filmed.

(“Society of the Snow” contains violence and grisly images)

“Society of the Snow”

Rated R. In Spanish with subtitles. On Netflix. Grade: A