J.A. Bayona’s first full-length outing as a director was a horror movie. I thought of that film factoid quite often when watching the Spanish-born director’s latest, the docudrama Society of the Snow. Yes, Bayona builds the narrative (working with three other credited screenwriters) around the well-known true story of a 1972 plane crash that left its passengers, most of them members of a Uruguayan rugby team, stranded with little hope of rescue in the inhospitable habitat of the Andes Mountain. In its details, the film seems to be meticulously researched and crafted with a vigilant respect for factual accuracy. Bayona and his collaborators largely avoid the creeping storytelling tropes of manipulative character conflict and unrealistically colorful personalities meant to draw the viewer in. There’s a sense that the filmmakers see themselves as reporters more than dramatists. It just so happens that what they’re dramatizing is, in almost every respect, decidedly gruesome.

The most famous — of infamous — facet of this tale is the fact that the survivors felt compelled to butcher and consume their fallen fellow passengers in order to give themselves necessary sustenance as their time on the frigid mountain stretched to more than two months. That stomach-turning bit of business evidently interests Bayona the least. Although he sympathetically addresses the moral dilemma at play, Bayona mostly presents the desperate cannibalism as a harsh necessity and doesn’t linger on the sinewy particulars of the unfortunate diet. That is one of the few instances of restraint. Society of the Snow has a tactile fascination for the physical agonies of the people on screen that rivals the body-horror oeuvre of David Cronenberg. The camera presses on the crunching of bones during the plane crash, the freezer-burn ravages of the high-altitude air on human skin, and even the crunchy flaking of scabs. The film sometimes comes across like a tool built to help chart a scale of squeamishness.

Arguably, Bayona’s approach is laudable. This experience was endured by people, so witnessing it, even in this fictionalized form, is a means of understanding what they went through. In practice, Bayona’s approach has a dulling effect. Despite some fine work by many of the actors onscreen (most notably, Enzo Vogrincic Roldán as Numa, a player who tries hard to hold onto his humanity), the characters don’t come into focus as individuals, which makes Society of the Snow feel like an extreme theoretical, prompting curiosity about how oneself might react in a similar scenario rather than real empathy for those who actually lived it.