Directed by Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia

Written by David Desola and Pedro Rivera

Starring Ivan Massague

The Platform is a frustrating movie that takes its good premise and beats you over the head with its messages. I think I enjoyed parts of it, even started to dig it when it finally got going in its final act. But the film’s final moments (cool as they may be on paper) left me feeling cheated. There’s such a thing as being too inconclusive. As in leaving a story to its simplest ending because you couldn’t think of an original one. And that I think makes it not worth watching in the first place.

A man awakens in a confined prison cell. There are openings on the floor and the ceiling to other levels. There’s one old man in the room with him. Above and below the cells each have two people in them as well. Once a day a platform comes down from above with food on it. Well, what’s left of the food from the levels above. They’re on floor 48, which the old man explains “is a good floor”. He explains a lot of things.

The food of the platform is prepared at the highest level, and works its way down all the way to the bottom. The cellmates of each floor choose how much to eat with the platform’s limited timing. There’s enough food on it for all the levels, so it is said, if everyone took their fair share. But of course the people in the first levels eat more than anyone else, and the ones way down will starve. Every month the cellmates are switched to another random floor with each other (assuming they are both still alive).

The movie’s premise is an obvious parable for the dangers of capitalism, specifically late stage capitalism. Where the greed of the few of the top leaves nothing for the lower majority. And how those above you will always take advantage of their position. And force the people at the bottom in the same circumstance to eat each other. And the cyclical nature of such a broken system.

Weird rules are established. If anyone keeps food after the platform has descended, the room will rise abnormally hot to roast them to death. Or freeze till they die. Until the food is tossed down where it belongs. Also each person is allowed to bring one thing with them, anything they want. Seemingly, this is a prison of the future, yet our main guy has chosen of his own free will to enter. Because he wants to quit smoking and read Don Quixote. What. And get a college degree? 6 months in the “hole” will reward him with these. More obvious messages.

This all sounds intriguing, but the movie chooses the old man in the first room to be a canon of exposition. He’s been tossed around in the system for so long he knows all the rules and doesn’t have a problem telling us. I guess that works for some people.

He knows the levels go way below 132. And he’s been among the highest as well. He knows no one will help those below them. He knows what he has to do to his cellmate if they end up too low.

A big mistake was the movie’s decision to have dead characters come back as illusions/dreams/insights to our main guy’s mind. Two of whom represent selfishness and altruism. It’s pretty boring. Movies that take this lazy route annoy me. I don’t want to keep seeing and hearing the same ideas from the first 5 minutes for the entire runtime. Do something with them.

The movie’s best character arrives deep into the story, and with our main guy, their decision and actions for an uprising (wrong choice of words here I think) finally gave me hope at the point of this all. Here at last was what to do with this mess of situation. In order to go up, you must go down. And the movie had me here, briefly I learned, as I was interested to see where it would go. But you now already know this is where it cuts it all short, and ends where it shouldn’t. On an ending any one of us could have thought up or written. It was already short, at around 90 min, and I should have known not to expect anything decent of a resolution. But I hope for these things, even low budget Spanish horror. Wrongly, I suppose.

If you’re a die hard fan of this type of stuff you’ll like this movie. Just don’t look too deep into it, you’ll never make it out alive. Too much doesn’t make sense, and the plot holes and empty lapses in story are big enough to throw the moon through. Others I think will feel as frustrated as I do. More still won’t like the film’s repetition of its themes. With our main guy being an obvious Christ like stand in. And how circumstance dictates morals, “I’m not a murderer, I’m someone who’s frightened”. And the obvious consequences of greed and wanting more than what you have. I guess that’s why the old man always says “obviously”