Platform, The
Entry updated 13 November 2024. Tagged: Film.
Spanish film (2019); original title El hoyo ["The Hole"]. Basque Films, Mr Miyagi Films, Plataforma La Película A.I.E. Directed by Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia. Written by David Desola and Pedro Rivero. Cast includes Emilio Buale, Zorion Eguileor, Alexandra Masangkay, Iván Massagué and Antonia San Juan. 94 minutes. Colour.
The "Vertical Self-Management Centre" is a tower block that operates as a Prison. Prisoners move between floors, which are randomly assigned once a month. A moving platform brings food vertically from the top, with each level given two minutes to eat as much as they can. Hoarding food is punished with the level being heated to fatal temperatures. The lower floors (one character estimates there are 250) thus get very little food, leading to cannibalism and murder. Goreng (Massagué) has in fact volunteered to spend six months in the prison in exchange for a diploma, though he is clearly ignorant of (and horrified by) its workings. After killing a fellow inmate who tries to kill him for food, he teams up with others to try to evenly distribute food among the platforms. He suffers from hallucinations, however, especially after eating the flesh of inmates who have died, and is convinced he must bring "the message" (which means something different to each character) to the lower floors. Reaching the bottom of the platform, he walks away, whether "the message" has been delivered or not remaining ambiguous.
Based on an unproduced theatre script by writers Desola and Rivero, this high-concept Horror-sf film inevitably produced comparisons with Cube (1997), though with considerable added gruesomeness and scatology. The director has spoken of it as a political parable, with Goreng as the distributor of wealth attempting to bring harmony to a Dystopian situation. The film found its real audience on Netflix during the Covid-19 pandemic, as many saw in it a particularly horrific exaggeration of life during lockdown and the societal breakdown many envisaged, reaching an audience far beyond most foreign language genre films. The plot does not hold up to much scrutiny, but this is a memorable and distinctive example of dystopian horror cinema. The clever casting of comic actors in the main roles adds an extra layer of irony.
The Platform 2 (2024) is a prequel, with the same director but a different cast. [CWa]
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