With all the time I now have free because I have given up on trying to maintain any type of sleep schedule, I have immersed myself in the world of Netflix horror movies. Most of them aren’t great, and are frankly complete knock offs of the Conjuring or Suspiria, HOWEVER I was incredibly pleasantly surprised when I stumbled across the Platform.

The Platform is a Spanish movie directed by Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia, a smaller director who has never made a full length film before, but worked on some music videos for well known Latin artists. It was released to Netflix in late February, and received a lot of attention for its incredible acting, absurd premise and very clear meaning. According to Gaztelu-Urrutia, the story was based on a play, and the screenwriters’ greatest concern with the film adaptation was maintaining the message the play pushed.

The plot follows Goreng, an everyman character and his experiences in a dystopian prison that is a very clear allegory to the dangers of blindly accepting capitalism. The prison is set up so that every person inside has one roommate and every month they wake up on a new floor of the building. The only problem in the building is that every day there is a platform that travels down the levels and it is filled with food. The amount of food is just enough that if everyone took a fair portion then everyone could be fed, but no one actually does that. Throughout the film we see people on the higher floors (even though they get there randomly and there is no way to ensure that you are higher) take too much and look down on the people below though. Their placements are completely arbitrary, but being put in a higher class/floor, makes the characters act disgustingly. 

Throughout the film we also see how being placed in such a society affects different types of people, and the characters represent groups that emerged due to a capitalist society. We are presented with altruists who try their best to ration the food, and tell everyone to consider the people below them, and then get completely rejected. Humanity can’t win out in a situation where everyone is always pitted against each other and Gaztelu-Urrutia explores that in such a grotesque and interesting way. We experience people who represent conservatives and those who are complacent in the system. They can recognize what is wrong but they think you should just take what you can get and abide by the rules of the system. We even meet a character who is from the administration who doesn’t understand the way the experiment ACTUALLY works, because from outside that society you can never know what it is like to be stuck in its cycle.

In conclusion, this movie was amazing and thought provoking. If you don’t like movies with political undertones this isn’t  for you, and if you don’t like movies with gore this isn’t for you. There is also some gross food stuff, but you can always look away. I would 100% recommend otherwise.