Isn't that otherwise a survivable (albeit very painful) injury?
https://writersforensicsblog.wordpress.com/2013/01/27/q-and-a-can-my-character-survive-an-arrow-to-the-back-yet-have-long-term-pain/
Where in the back? Because if a crossbow bolt punctures your heart, you die then and there. If it punctures a lung, your liver, your spleen, your stomach, or any other abdominal organ you care to name, you probably die unless you can get to a modern trauma center - ideally within an hour. About the only way you can survive a crossbow bolt to the back without that trauma center, is if it hits the side of your upper torso and lodges in the muscles near the shoulder, as long as it misses the subclavian artery that's there. And the subclavian veins.
Now I admit it's been a long, long time since I've seen this stupid movie, but I vaguely recall a lot of it taking place in the Himalayas, a long way from trauma centers.
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If someone else had responded, I'd tell them about all the vital organs you can reach through a human back, if you use sufficient force.
But the world is better off if people like you don't find these things out.
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Crossbows have a lot of power. Without knowing the draw weight of that particular crossbow, I can’t tell you accurately what an arrow would do to a human, but I can guess that it would penetrate from 3 to 8 centimeters.
To kill that quickly, the bolt would have to do one of three things: sever her spinal column, cut a major blood vessel, or stab her heart.
The spine isn’t very deep inside the body. It’s certainly possible the bolt could hit her directly in the spine, and with luck slip between vertebrae and sever the spinal cord, shutting down her nervous system and she would die. However, she wouldn’t be able to speak if that happened.
Looking at the video, and stills from the video, it does look like the bolt could line up with her heart, so it’s also possible, though much less likely, that a single bolt to the back could penetrate between ribs, pierce the heart or cut a blood vessel, and she would bleed to death pretty quickly, but she might be alive long enough to spit out a few last words.
Of course, there’s no blood on her back, so I don’t think there’s a real-world analogue for what’s happening in that scene.
Weren't crossbows originally invented to get bolts through plate armor? So wouldn't they go a lot further in than 3-8 cm? I mean, people kill deer with those things at surprisingly long distances, and deer aren't much smaller than adult humans.
And if you shoot at the human back and the bolt goes in 3-8 cm, there are still plenty of deadly places it could hit. You could puncture a lung or some of the larger blood vessels, or sever the spinal column, or if you hit a spleen, liver, kidney, stomach, or intestines, your victim could die from blood loss or infection, although not immediately. Although again the biggest determining factor in whether any of these hits actually kill your victim depend on whether you're close to a modern trauma center. With most of the sites in question, if you get proper medical help you live, if you're out in the wilderness you probably die.
If you're interested in seeing what goes where and how close all the vital organs are to the back, I recommend going to google images and looking up CT (computed tomography) slides. Search "CT chest" or "CT abdomen" to see pictures.
PS: Ignore that other guy, he's mad at me because I like the new Star Wars movies. No, really!