The Platform; A Sacrifice for Future
Before You Watch The PLatform
Synopsis: Goreng awakes in a concrete cell marked with the number 48. He has a cellmate, Trimagasi, who explains that they are in prison made like a tower, and food is delivered via a platform that travels like a lift from the top to down through the large holes in the floors and ceilings of cells. Prisoners on the lower levels have to eat what those at the top leave them. If prisoners try to hoard food after the platform has left their level, their room will be extremely heated or cooled.
After You Watched
The Platform is not just a sci-fi movie about a strange tower-shape prison and the secrets of survival there. The movie even doesn’t try to show a connection between the prison and the real world. In fact, it tries to keep its distance from the reality outside the prison because it makes the audience to focus on the terrible situation inside.
In the beginning, it seems that despite the violent and brutal atmosphere of the prison, there are some hopes and little signs of humanity particularly in Goreng. He tries to protect the woman who seeks her lost kid in prison and to keep her safe. He also denies the need to eat his cellmate to survive but gradually he changes and adapts to the situation.
This motif of The Platform focused on human psychology and how the situation and the survival instinct push humans beyond the boundaries of good and evil. Goreng as an idealist who chooses a book as the only object he can keep in the cell, later uses knives to kill others. Even when he finds a solution for stopping eating cellmates at the lowest levels of the prison, he uses violence to keep things in order. Unlike the woman who becomes his cellmate for a while, he loses his trust in humanity and gets to believe that only power and fear can force people to do the right thing.
His plan to distribute food in a fair way finally ends in killing some of the prisoners but he still believes that he can fight the system of inequality in the prison that symbolically points to inequality of human societies. He thinks that if he can save a delicate food and send it back up to the management, they will have a more humane approach towards prisoners. He and his last cellmate keep the food until they reach the lowest level of the Platform. They find the lost boy of the woman whom Goreng was trying to protect but murdered by other prisoners.
The boy is a sign of hope and future here and that is why they gave the food to the boy instead of sending it up as a message to management. It seems that Goreng after his long bloody journey finds himself and his humanity again and this is more important to him than fighting the system or improving the condition of the Platform.
The Platform reminds us of some classic movies of Spanish and Italian filmmakers like Luis Bonoel and Pier Paolo Pasolini and the way they have used disturbing scenes to create more impacts on the audience.
Director: Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia
Writers: David Desola (screenplay by), David Desola (story by)
Stars: Ivan Massagué, Zorion Eguileor, Antonia San Juan
