Released on Netflix in March of 2020 (unbelievably perfect timing for a movie about people confined to an inescapable prison whose design pits insatiable self-interest against the public good), Spanish filmmaker Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s “The Platform” is an anti-capitalism allegory whose obviousness is its greatest strength. Like so many streaming hits, the genre exercise resonated because its high-concept premise told a compelling story unto itself.
The film’s most and only memorable character is “The Pit” where it takes place, a narrow concrete tower (or “Vertical Self-Management Center”) with a large square hole in the middle of each floor — a hole just large enough to fit the massive smorgasbord of food that’s lowered down the building’s 333 stories each day. The two inmates on the top floor are treated to a royal banquet, but only a few errant scraps remain when the movable feast reaches the 50th level below them; anyone randomly assigned to the bottom half of the building is almost guaranteed to starve to death by the end of the monthly rotation… unless of course they eat their cellmates alive. The barbarism of our social hierarchies had seldom been put on such clear and pungent display, and “The Platform” remains one of the few movies to make the failures of trickle-down economics seem even more self-evident than they are in real life.
The only problem with such a clever premise is that the rest of the story has to disturb it, and while the prison in Gaztelu-Urrutia’s film grew more intriguing with each new detail we learned about it, the people desperately searching for a way out of it did not. Neither did their increasingly feverish escape plans. Crafting a metaphor for capitalism is one thing; solving it in the span of an independently financed dystopian thriller is another.
Watching the first half of “The Platform 2,” it would seem that Gaztelu-Urrutia has identified where his previous movie went wrong. Instead of focusing on the design of the prison (and, by extension, how its quirks might be exploited into exits), this Netflix-funded sequel immediately shifts its attention to the systems that might allow the film’s inmates to survive it, a decision that allows Gaztelu-Urrutia to deepen the franchise’s Stanford Prison Experiment-like study of human nature.
Where its predecessor instructed people to be the change they wished to see in the Pit, “The Platform 2” concerns itself with the solidarity required for everyone to stay alive. Alas, people are ultimately prisoners to themselves (to their wants, and to their wounds), and not even the most idealistic of systems are immune to the foibles we sow into them. Similar to the first movie, which “The Platform 2” expects you to remember in delusionally explicit detail, this sequel breaks down in tandem with its social order.
Much as Gaztelu-Urrutia reaffirms his gift for blending Cartesian-like philosophy with “Saw”-inspired aesthetics, he also reaffirms his struggle to leverage that mash-up into a story worth telling. If “The Platform 2” iterates on the original idea in a way that proves this property’s franchise potential, it falls apart in almost the exact same way as the previous film, abandoning the broadly representational nature of its premise in favor of the maddeningly specific mythology of its silly non-characters. Except this time it’s a little bit worse, because that mythology — already dull to begin with — is now consecrated into a legend of pseudo-religious importance. Like the platform itself, this sequel is overflowing with delicious things to chew on when it starts, only to get picked apart as it descends into darkness from there.
It’s hard to tell how much time has passed since the events of “The Platform,” but steely-eyed new heroine Perempuan (Milena Smit) has been there long enough to learn the ropes. A guilt-ridden artist who starts the film on the 24th floor, she instructs her barrel-chested and constantly shirtless new roommate Zamiatin (actor, comic, and former boxer Hovik Keuchkerian) on how things have worked since the revolution that seems to have resulted from the ultra-nebulous ending of the first movie.
The Pit is a lot fairer now, with the holy law of share and share alike seeping deeper into the tower with each rotation. Galvanized by the Christ-like story of a prisoner who fed other people with his own flesh, each inmate eats only the dish they personally requested upon arrival, theoretically ensuring that no one starves to death. The residents of the Pit enforce this law with extreme prejudice, with some of them going so far as to murder (and worse) anyone who has even a single bite of someone else’s food. That crucially includes any potential leftovers, as no one should ever benefit from the murder of a comrade.
There are still a few weak links in the chain, but the system is starting to work; a few scraps of food made it all the way down to the 175th floor during the last rotation. Par for the course of this emergent franchise, “The Platform 2” is at its best during its table-setting stages, as Perempuan gradually convinces the oafish Zamiatin — who’s smarter than he seems — to follow the rules, and the solidarity they display with their fellow prisoners sparks a genuine friendship between them. Perempuan even offers to shave Zamiatin’s back.
Alas, the end of the month arrives right on schedule, and Perempuan finds herself relocated to floor 180, along with a one-armed new roommate (“Game of Thrones” actress Natalia Tena) who’s all too familiar with the brand of holy justice that has begun to spread through the Pit. It will only be a matter of time before that fundamentalist zeal — administered by an eyeless prophet named Dagin Babi — threatens to become even deadlier than the every man for himself approach it sought to replace.
That conflict is compelling enough so long as it shines a dank and disgusting light on the recognizably ugly truths of maintaining a society: The law is easier to respect for the people at the top, and those people in turn have a greater responsibility to follow the rules that it sets. When someone on the 40th floor decides to act in their own self-interest, it’s the prisoners on the 293 floors below them who stand to suffer the consequences… unless the prisoners above them agree to mete out a fitting punishment.
But Gaztelu-Urrutia loses his grip on the fight to create a future where no one has to kill anyone, as the competing arguments behind that conflict soon give way to the practicalities of surviving it. Where a more nutritious film might have turned that into a social commentary of its own, “The Platform 2” can’t seem to decide if it should address the war that begins to drip down the Pit as a literal crisis or a philosophical one, and so — echoing the last movie — it hedges between those two approaches in a way that makes it all but impossible to care about either of them.
The scraps of character detail we get are ridiculous in a way that cheapens the reality that Gaztelu-Urrutia is trying to build around them, and the vague flashbacks he pads them out with only serve to unmoor from the horrors of Perempuan’s situation. There’s enough squelchy awfulness on display to keep horror fans engaged until the third act (the acolytes devise some uniquely Pit-centric torture methods), but the film grows bored with the limits and implications of its own metaphor, and its tendency to become more high-minded as it sinks lower into the prison forces it to ditch its human drama in favor of sloppy abstraction.
Starting from such great heights, “The Platform 2” descends into a dull and delirious sludge of color gels, religious iconography, and head-scratching callbacks (which continue well into the end credits), none of which are even half as interesting as the basic premise of the plot they’re all working so hard to dilute. There’s room to keep expanding on this world, and the ending of “The Platform 2” suggests that Gaztelu-Urrutia intends to do just that, but “The Platform 3” needs to give us a lot more to chew on in order to justify another stint in the Pit. The prisoners there might be lucky to find anything left on their plate, but Netflix subscribers hungry for ham-fisted sci-fi allegories are nothing if not spoiled for choice.
Grade: C+
“The Platform 2” will be available to stream on Netflix starting Friday, October 4.
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