Release Date: March 20, 2020

Cast: Ivan Massague (Goreng), Alexandra Masangkay (Miharu), Antonia San Juan (Imoguiri), Emilio Buale Coka (Baharat)

Director: Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia

Rating: TV-MA

Our Grade: A

“The Platform” is a Netflix original film that takes place in a prison. This prison has an unknown amount of floors with each floor being a cell and two prisoners per cell. At the center of every floor is a hole from which you look down into all the cells below. Through this hole, a table of food passes that starts at floor one and works its way down. This means that by the time the table reaches near the end of the prison, there is just about nothing left to eat.

In “The Platform”, we follow a prisoner named Goreng, who we promptly find out was self admitted in attempt to get rid of his smoking habits. As soon as Goreng finds out that the prison is not what he thought it to be, he goes through a series of plans with cellmates as an attempt to escape.

The director’s aim for the film was to comment on today’s social structure and the selfishness of those around us. The prison is meant to be the world we live in and the floor where you are placed is your rank in society. How you act and treat others correlates directly with your floor and we see this in Goreng’s cell mates. His first cell mate made statements like “they (the prisoners) are above you, they will not answer” and “they (the prisoners) are below you, do not speak to them.”

With the prisoners’ floor being randomly assigned every month, they could be at a high rank one session and at the very bottom the next. When a prisoner does get lucky and gets placed on a higher floor, they take advantage, gorging on the feast set up for all the prisoners. Goreng infers that there is enough food on the table to feed everyone in the prison, but only if everyone else was willing to participate in rationing. The director made it clear how the prisoners, acting as everyday people in this metaphor, are greedy and take so much that the prisoners below them are forced to eat their leftovers.

“I understood the concept of the movie, it was just a bit hard to follow at times and even by the end I was still a little confused,” sophomore Melanie Venere said.

“The Platform” has been compared to other films such as “Snowpeircer” and “Cube” due to their similarities in calling out social hierarchies. But, we disagree with any comparison to “The Platform”. The film stands on its own and earns that independence through its daring film choices. For example, there were many scenes where there was a significant amount of gore and many found it hard to watch. We see the gore as a stepping stone to proving a point. It was placed into the film to make the viewers face truly gruesome material and what people do to reach a higher ranking in the system.

Overall, the film was philosophical in many ways, commenting on modern day social ranks and how little consideration we have for others. Some seem to think the movie’s release ties in perfectly with our current pandemic situation, reflecting on how some behave. The concept was interesting and well executed, leaving the audience with food for thought.