Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Lost in the Amazon: The Rescue That Shocked the World’ on Max, an Artful Spanish-Language Survivalist Documentary

Lost in the Amazon: The Rescue That Shocked the World (now on Max) documents the tireless cross-cultural effort to find four children in the Colombian jungle, who had to fend for themselves for 40 days after a small plane crash killed the three adults on board, including their mother. This hour-long, Spanish-language doc – directed by Jimmy Chin, Juan Camilo Cruz and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi – pieces together on-site footage with impressionistic imagery and talking-head interviews, and chronicles the spiritual and pragmatic hurdles that had to be overcome in order to pull off an against-the-odds endeavor.

LOST IN THE AMAZON: THE RESCUE THAT SHOCKED THE WORLD: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We open with footage of the rainforest, an untamed wilderness dense with foliage. It’s a soothing portrait of untouched nature – gorgeous greenery soundtracked by a chorus of birds and insects – tainted by an air of danger. Too much of it, and a person dies of exposure, hunger or predator. The directors add to that air, layering in the sounds of children singing, adult voices shouting their names and blowing whistles, verbal messages funneled through loudspeakers, helicopter blades whipping through the air. It’s a highly effective stretch of film that’s so preoccupied with setting the mood, it seemingly forgets to tell us when these tragic and terrifying events happened, so I looked it up: Spring of 2023. Details. 

Family members of survivors, journalists and rescuers function as talking heads, piecing together the story. On the morning of May 1, a small plane left the remote Araracuara area of Colombia, heading to San Jose. The pilot radioed a distress signal, followed by silence. The plane went down over Guaviare, a vast and dangerous stretch of virgin forest 200 kilometers from civilization where it sometimes rains 16 hours a day, has dense patches that get no sunlight, and is frequented by criminals operating with little oversight. The government sent a military search party into the bush, and the group formed an alliance with Indigenous peoples to find the plane – a tentative, uneasy pairing, as the Indigenous foster a healthy distrust of authority. But any differences were set aside in the quest to save lives.

A few days in, a group of Indigenous folk found the wrecked plane and three adult bodies. Among them was Magdalena Mucutuy, an Indigenous woman of the Murui tribe. Her four children, ranging in age from 13 to 11 months, were nowhere to be found. So there was hope – these kids belonged to a people who learned to respect the jungle and use its bounty to their advantage. People searched by air and foot, finding evidence of survival: a discarded baby bottle, abandoned makeshift shelters, scissors used to cut down brush. As news of the search goes international, political concerns, conspiracy and superstition emerge from the story, and the Indigenous wonder if the jungle they worship is hiding or protecting the children from the people they don’t always trust. The Indigenous lean on prayer and other spiritual means for assistance, while government representatives calculate that the chances of survival get slim after 40 days. But it’s day 39. Is hope dimming? 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Rescue is a gripping chronicle of the high-profile efforts of divers and authorities rescuing a boy’s soccer team from a flooded cave in Thailand in 2018 – and it’s one of the best documentaries of the last decade. (And Ron Howard’s 2022 fictionalized dramatization, Thirteen Lives, is nearly as great.)

Performance Worth Watching: Nicolas Ordonez Flores of the Guiama tribe assisted in the search, and provides valuable context about the tense dynamic between the Indigenous and authorities.

Memorable Dialogue: Flores shares a key reason why the children could take care of themselves in such a harsh environment: “They know that remaining calm is fundamental to surviving in the jungle.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Lost in the Amazon never establishes a clear timeline of events, which requires some external research on our part and overlooks one of the baseline tenets of who-what-where-when-why journalism. And the directors fill large chunks of the run time with meditative imagery of the rainforest, capturing its density, dampness, countless unseen threats. While those portions boast a Werner Herzogian sense of intense elemental dread – beautiful but deadly – it isn’t clear what we’re supposed to take from these moments. Vibes, for sure. Possibly the perspective of one who’s lost, or the one who’s searching for one who’s lost. Most likely it reflects the overwhelming, stifling nature of a cold and unfriendly environment that four very young people managed to endure for weeks on their own, the odds seemingly stacked heavily against them.

The directors’ apparent intent is to create a work of intuitive artistry you don’t typically find in nonfiction films. It lacks the flow of traditional tension-and-release narratives, instead indulging silent, near-static moments that feel calculated to replicate the eerily quiet fears of being lost in nature, and the tedious struggle their rescuers endured for days and hours and weeks, conducting a needle-in-a-haystack search. The film provides enough of the dynamic between Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures to capture an ecstatic truth within a compelling sotry, and the result is an unusual, but effective documentary that avoids the cliches of existential survival sagas. 

Our Call: Despite its flaws – including its generic title – Lost in the Amazon is a thoughtfully constructed and worthwhile documentary. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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