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The Platform

Modern horror films rarely get better than The Platform.

The Platform

(Platform: Netflix)

Grade: A-

Director: Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia (La casa de lago)

Screenplay: David Desola (The Paramedic), Pedro Rivero (Bird Boy: The Forgotten Children)

Cast: Ivan Massague (Pan’s Labyrinth), Zorion Eguileor (La Caza. Monteperdido)

Rating: NR

Runtime: 1h 34m

By: John DeSando

“There are 3 kinds of people; the ones above, the ones below, and the ones who fall.” Goreng (Ivan Massaque)

Edgar Allen Poe meets Charles Darwin under the guidance of Rod Serling, Samuel Beckett, and Ronald Reagan. Such are my immediate reference points for one of the most impressive horror films I have seen lately. A vertical prison holds criminals and civilians with their wealth only food. As in Jong Boon Ho’s Snowpiercer, the social strata are clearly set out, here with the lower classes at the end of the hundreds of floors without food because the platform delivers down so that there is no more shared food by the end. The upper-class leaves little for the underlings.

Except that human flesh is available on every floor. Cannibalism mixed with class warfare is the stuff of this grisly and macabre, but immensely entertaining piece, exceeding Saw and the bloodiest Zombie vehicle you can think of for production design. Where it exceeds formula is its almost too apparent allegory relishing several motifs including religious communion that eats the body and blood of Christ and now relentless coronavirus.

More simply in politics is the inhumanity of the trickle-down theory, in which the rich are not going to let the poor below have enough trickle to eat. The descent of the food-bearing platform is not only a physical reality, it is also a figurative one, in which hell is located where the food is not.

Goreng has volunteered to stay in The Pit for a while to get an accredited degree and read Don Quixote. The novel is too obvious a symbol of his feckless messianic purpose. His cellmate, Trimagasi (Zorion Equileor), torments him as the Devil did Christ in the desert with the gruesome details of the life Ivan has signed up for and the futility of Ivan’s humanitarian instincts. Along the way, women will visit the bleak scene (cell assignments change each month) to tempt or save in a common role for them is this Dantean setup and the Bible.

Dante’s rings of Hellish torture are just another of the allusions that bring together the horror the world’s great writers can conjure up for long-suffering humanity. Is there salvation? Will Ivan be the savior? Will the poor eat the rich?

The Platform, as it streams on Netflix and comes from Spain and several other countries, emphasizes the interconnected nature of filmmaking, and like the coronavirus, the democratic nature of evil which surfaces in horror films in the presence of weak, survivalist humanity.

Don’t be afraid of the dubbing—it’s done seamlessly for several languages. Bright filmmakers.

John DeSando holds a BA from Georgetown University and a Ph.D. in English from The University of Arizona. He served several universities as a professor, dean, and academic vice president. He has been producing and broadcasting as a film critic on It’s Movie Time and Cinema Classics for more than two decades. DeSando received the Los Angeles Press Club's first-place honors for national entertainment journalism.