“Don’t speak to the people below, because they’re below. The people above won’t answer you, because they’re above obviously.”
This is what elderly prisoner Trimagasi (Zorion Eguileor) tells Goreng (Iván Massagué) when he awakens in the same cell within an undisclosed building housing hundreds of floors with a single rectangular opening cut out of both the floor and ceiling through which a platform descends daily bearing the leftovers of the food from above. On a monthly basis, the interred will be removed to different levels, nobody truly knowing how many there are, only that the further from the top the greater the inevitability of starvation; and food cannot be kept, otherwise cells are heated or cooled to fatal degrees. In spite of this, Trimagasi has come to accept the system. After he urinates on the food of the complaining people one level down, Goreng notes next month they may be above them. “Yes,” says Trimagasi. “And they’ll piss on us, the bastards.”
The Platform doesn’t mince its’ meaning in any way. The Spanish social thriller from director Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia would rather club you over the head with the urgency of its emphatic message than merely allude to it through subtler means and allegory. It is translating nothing less than a brutal, visceral, and violent microcosm of the reality of wealth and resource disparity in the modern world. I don’t think I’ve seen a film this passionately critical of systems of inequity since Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You. But this film is even more concerned that you take heed of what it’s trying to say, pluming the depths of human nature and the horror of an unjust order that rewards the few at the expense of the many and expects you to be selfish and dispassionate to survive. The movie has a point to make, and it does so through the most extreme measures.
It’s evident from the opening shots, which indulge in the finest and most opulently prepared food you’ve ever seen, in an atmosphere that seems to suggest a particularly high-end dining party. The camera hovers with a grotesque lust over exquisite deserts, ripe fruits, and all kinds of delicacies. When next we see what’s left of this feast as it reaches Goreng and Trimagasi, it’s a mess of half-eaten meat and crumbs of deserts. Trimagasi chews on what’s left edible of a chicken leg, and yet his devouring is characterized with a ravaging gluttony no doubt indistinguishable from that of the consumers above. The very act of eating is made to be disgusting because in this film the ones who eat are doing so to directly starve others. And yet they too are deprived, slaves as much as the straggling beneath to the greed of their oligarchs.
It’s not just about food. Trimagasi tells a story about how he was compelled to buy a specialized knife on a T.V. ad that he didn’t really need to begin with, only for it to be rendered obsolete by the time he got it by a new knife that self-sharpened. His frustration led to the manslaughter that landed him in this “Vertical Self-Management Centre”. It was either that or an asylum. Conversely, Goreng is there to receive a diploma. Though unaware of what it really was, both technically chose this treatment in exchange for something that shouldn’t have come down to a choice to begin with.
These themes and metaphors are potent, but the movies’ strength is just as much in the graphic illustrations and plot developments that facilitate its’ meaning. And there are bits of the movie that are rough to watch if you don’t have the stomach for things like cannibalism, suicide, and torture, in addition to the periodic violence between people locked up in dire circumstances. But every acceleration has a purpose both for the intended metaphor and ratcheting up tension, keeping you engrossed no matter how grim things get. The film isn’t so cynical that it doesn’t have a beacon of hope. Goreng is a good person, horrified by all of this and determined to break the system as much as is possible. Though I understand he’s better known as a comic actor in Spain, Massagué makes the transition terrifically with his gloomy but quietly impassioned performance. Eguileor is marvellous as well, mildly sympathetic though he may be, he relishes the slimy psychopath and his dreadful monologues with the gumption of someone vying to be the next Christoph Waltz or Rutger Hauer. And then there’s the unspeaking Alexandra Masangkay as a mysterious inmate who rides the platform down every month in search of her child, cannibalizing her cellmates and anyone who gets in her way -a striking figure and performance that I’m sure will be remembered by genre fans.
The film is based on a play, sharply written by the same playwrights David Desola and Pedro Rivero. Obviously the bottled setting and emphasis on staging is suggestive of this origin, giving it a different feel to similar thrillers. In places it evokes Bueñel (especially The Exterminating Angel), elsewhere Samuel Beckett or The Silence of the Lambs. The vivid class conscious metaphor of the Platform and “the Hole” is highly reminiscent of Snowpiercer but with the aesthetic of Cube -and just as Kafkaesque. The Platform is all of these sources and its’ own - a stark image of an uncompromising capitalism content in the needless suffering of the masses.
For what conviction and willpower Goreng demonstrates and the iota of hope the film ends on, this isn’t a movie that has an answer, condemning the avarice of human nature almost as much as the powers that profit off it. But The Platform is also vividly reinforcing that we in the globalized, developed, richest nations have the power to feed the world and end poverty; and The Platform forces us to contend with why we choose not to.
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