‘Snowpiercer’ on Netflix: I’ll Never Get Over “Babies Taste Best”

Snowpiercer is an elementally horrific film. It’s a dystopian thriller set in a world humanity sabotaged themselves: pumping the atmosphere full of a chemical to counteract global warming only to turn the planet into a frozen wasteland. The only human survivors left are on an “ark,” a super fast, self-containging train circling the globe. People are organized in a horrific caste system that makes those in the back practical slaves. We watch children stolen from their parents, humans forced to eat bugs, and the arms of rebels cut off by torturous exposure to the cold.

Beyond the violence and the injustice, the machine gun toting school teachers and chaotic axe fights, the most haunting part of Snowpiercer comes at the very end of the film.

**SPOILERS FOR SNOWPIERCER AHEAD**

I’m naturally talking about the incredible scene where Chris Evans, Captain America himself, tearfully admits that when it comes to eating human beings, he knows that babies taste best. I’ll never, ever get over it.

Lets set the scene. After about an hour and a half of plotting an uprising and moving forward in the train from car-to-car, only Curtis (Chris Evans) and Namgoong Minsoo (Song Kang Ho), the man who created the security system on the train, are left on the floor in front of the final car, the carriage that houses Wilford (Ed Harris), the creator of the train. Curtis is desperate to enter in order to take revenge on all the pain Wilford’s plan has caused. In order to make his point, Curtis explains to Namgoong just what went on in the early days of the “tail.”

Curtis paints a grim portrait of sheer anarchy. Deprived of their belongings, and crammed into a steel cage without food or water, the thousand or so people in the tail began to grow delirious and desperate. Finally, they shed their last bits of humanity.

“After a month, we ate the weak,” Curtis says. “You know what I hate about myself? I know what people taste like. I know that babies taste best.”

Curtis breaks down with this confession and goes on to tell a story about how the mayhem died down. He recalls how younger, stronger men began murdering mothers just to eat their babies and how an old man sacrificed his own arm to stop the violence. Curtis naturally points out that he was the ravenous young man and his mentor, Gilliam (John Hurt), was the heroic figure, while his deceased protegé Edgar (Jamie Bell) was the baby he tried to eat.

All told it’s a harrowing tale of the darkness people are capable of when it comes to ensuring their survival. Chris Evans delivers the whole monologue with utter despair and understandable self-hatred. It’s the kind of twisted passion befitting of such a painful and traumatic memory. Also, taken out of context, the line is darkly comic…because it’s insane.

I know, I know, I know, I shouldn’t laugh at the thought of cannibalism, especially when it involves babies. Still there is something in the dissonance of watching Captain America cry that “babies taste best” that is truly absurd in the most macabre way possible. You almost can imagine Steve Rogers gleefully chomping on some chonky baby cheeks and it’s so out there that it’s funny. (At least it is to me and my most monstrous friends.)

What’s ironic is Chris Evans is dynamite in this scene. Again, it’s only funny out of context. In context, Evans dissolves into Curtis’s misery and you feel like you yourself are sinking into sickly guilty horror. That’s why I can’t get over it. It’s such an awful mental image that I have to laugh at it or else I’ll spin off into madness.

Snowpiercer is ultimately the movie that taught me what I never wanted to know — that babies taste best — and I can’t ever forget it.

Snowpiercer is currently streaming on Netflix.

Where to stream Snowpiercer