Movie Review: The Platform (Spanish)

A nihilistic exploration of the tragedy of the commons, director Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia's The Platform (El hoyo in Spanish) plays out like a train wreck in slow motion you can't tear your eyes away from. In what's an effectively mounted dystopian parable, the incisive thriller imagines a brutalist hellscape of a building as a vertical self-management centre, where its residents — some of whom are prisoners, while a few others volunteer themselves in exchange for a diploma — are periodically switched at random to any of its innumerable floors and are fed exactly once every day by a dumbwaiter-like platform that's gradually sent down the levels through a hole cut into the centre of the tower. This moveable smorgasbord of food is enough for everyone, if the people only take what they exactly need, but it's also a system that's ripe for abuse and inequality, as those living at the top can eat as much as they can, leaving increasingly little for those below. After all, persuading the greedy to share isn't that easy, is it? The stark contrast between the haves and have-nots is well too documented, but The Platform, a capitalist horror film along the lines of Snowpiercer, suggests something far more personal and unsettling: that there's always someone above us and someone below us, and you've to be the agent of change you wish to see in the world. As a movie, it's blunt and goes about conveying its message with the ruthlessness and subtlety of a sledgehammer, but there's certainly some perverse pleasure to be had in the way it approaches themes of shifting moralities, sacrifice, class warfare and wealth disparity, even as it expertly raises the tension as the action hurtles toward a gruesome climax.