TIMELY TALE TAKES PRISONERS
Netflix’s The Platform is a smart, violent fable with dystopian vibes
Last year at the Toronto International Film Festival, Jojo Rabbit won the People’s Choice award, en route to six Academy Award nominations and an Oscar for best adapted screenplay. But can you name any other TIFF prizewinner?
The People’s Choice tends to suck up all the attention, but there are numerous other awards, including People’s Choices for best documentary and best Midnight Madness title.
Which brings us to The Platform, a smart, violent parable from first-time feature director Galder Gaztelu-urrutia of Spain that won the Midnight Madness prize last year. It opens on a simple scene. Goreng (Ivan Massagué) wakes up in a concrete cell that features a simple sink, a rectangular, dining-table-sized hole in the ceiling, a matching one in the floor, and a number carved into the wall. Forty-eight.
The rules are simple. Once a day, a stone slab, laden with food, descends from the ceiling, pausing for two minutes on each floor. You and your cellmate have that long to eat your fill. The higher your floor, the more you get. On 48, Goreng and Trimagasi (Zorion Eguileor), can consume whatever the 47 levels above haven’t touched. Floor 49 gets their leftovers. And on down the line. Each month you get a new, randomly assigned level.
Why? Don’t ask. The Platform isn’t telling. Even the incarceration justification is vague. Goreng seems to have signed up for six months in exchange for some sort of diploma. Later he’ll meet his intake co-ordinator, now also in the prison — or Vertical Self-management Centre, as she calls it — and arguing for more sharing between levels. Though as Trimagasi notes, there are only three types of people: “Those at the top, those at the bottom and those who fall.”
Like Vincenzo Natali’s 1997 cult Canadian hit Cube, this prison isn’t revealing any of its secrets, though that doesn’t lessen the tension one bit. (There’s another coincidental Canadian connection; Next Floor, a short film from Denis Villeneuve, made a dozen years ago, in which a party of well-heeled diners keeps crashing through one level after another of a decrepit building, with wait staff frantically chasing after them.)
The new-floor-every-month rule helps push the narrative forward. After 30 days in the relatively well-stocked Level 48, Goreng finds himself transported to the hell of Level 171. Later he’ll wake up on Level 6, alongside a cellmate with a rope who hopes to escape, if can just convince five floors of inmates above to lend a hand.
The actors in this Spanish-language production won’t be familiar to most viewers, but they’re perfectly cast in their roles. Eguileor, pudgy and soft, resembles a mid-level Soviet bureaucrat and wouldn’t look out of place in The Death of Stalin. Massagué is a bit of a scholar — a copy of Don Quixote is his one personal item, rather than the more practical knife or rope — and he looks like a stage-play version of the book’s title character, with his scraggly facial hair.
In some ways the release of The Platform could not be better timed. The food-scarcity motif will resonate with anyone observing ransacked grocery-store shelves with concern; and what better metaphor for self-isolation than a futuristic, dystopian prison? But even outside the context of a pandemic, this remains a clever, timely tale.
It’s like the philosophy problem known as the prisoner’s dilemma, only with lots more prisoners, most of them hungry.