The Platform - a review

[Disclaimer: While I will not, in the name of mercy, recommend this as a movie-night agenda, in the instance that you're reading this and planning to starve yourself of sleep for one (or more) night(s), I hereby raise a spoiler alert]

*cues Netflix's opening banner and beat-drop*

We are gazing through the eyes of a person -- man? woman? child? ourselves?). A glance through the space of a grand kitchen: rows of meat hanging from kitchen hooks, pig heads on metal tables, chefs moving about with professional decisiveness, almost like in an episode of Masterchef -- only that it's clear the set up is ironic. We know this isn't going to be one of those fist-in-mouth weekend entertainment, waiting to reveal who gets Ramsay's boot at the end of 40 minutes. The non-diegetic sounds permeate the space, its pace awkward but intentional.

This is how the movie begins.

Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia's The Platform hits Netflix's Top 10 New Release, and I can understand why. It's one of those films you'll tell your friends specifically to NOT see or they will regret it, and right after, said friends will precisely dive into their Adam and Eve complex like they can't help it and open up Netflix with some popcorn in hand.

Built on ideas somewhat similar to what inspired Orwell's Animal Farm, the Wachowskis' The Matrix and arguably even Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games, The Platform sets itself as a Dystopian horror that at first appears to be about individual greed and their animalistic struggle for survival in The Pit, but gradually travels deeper to reveal itself as a cold experiment on social conditioning and as a heavier message, the capitalistic conundrum.

Do I like The Platform? Hell fucking no.

I hate it because of the disgusting way it kept me feeling for days -- I felt disgusted when I wanted more, when a certain craving popped into my head (an increasingly habitual thing for me since the COVID-19 lockdown began), even when I'm simply using the word "obviously" in my speech (you know if you know). Needless to say, the film is extremely effective, and affective, to say the least.

There are three types of people here. Those at the top, those at the bottom, and those who fall.

Many film critics have already written about the film as an allegory of capitalism, and of blunt Darwinism. With the gross consumption (of food, then resorting to cannibalism), violence, starvation, suicide, waste (decay, feces, blood, guts) literally punctuating the film in all its glory, it is practically impossible to miss these unapologetically metaphors while they are screaming "You cannot dissociate. This is YOUR world!" Then layered with notions of racism "what is he now, your white master?", religious discrimination "which God?", ideological battles "Are you a communist?"... The mere choice of making a hero out of the protagonist scholar, Goreng, speaks volumes of irony -- because aren't the educated also the ones who stack the very capitalist (material-ladden) ladder we tirelessly strive to shuffle up to prove our worth? Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia proves to be quite the comedian, when he places Goreng as our hero, and the cherry on top is the one item he chose to take into The Pit with him...... *drumroll!!!* a Don Quixote novel!! Now we wonder where he got his noble ideas of chivalry from!

[A quick snippet from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote if 'Don Quixote' sounds like a food to you, like it did to me when I encountered it some years back]:

"The plot revolves around the adventures of a noble from La Mancha named Alonso Quixano, who reads so many chivalric romances that he loses his mind and decides to become a knight-errant to revive chivalry and serve his nation, under the name Don Quixote de la Mancha. He recruits a simple farmer, Sancho Panza, as his squire, who often employs a unique, earthy wit in dealing with Don Quixote's rhetorical monologues on knighthood, already considered old-fashioned at the time."

The Platform thus brings to life one of the greatest western literary works existing dating back to the 17th Century, and embodies its provocations in relevance to our world today. The question is, do we read Don Quixote -- and by extension The Platform, today as a comedy (as interpreted in the 17th C), an ethic novel (as in the post-French Revolution era), a social commentary (as in the 19th C), or as a tragedy of idealism (as a foundation of modern literature today)?

--

There is so much to think about, but I am inclined to take a first step into thinking, before anything else, if the film also functions as an allegory of basic human hospitality. Are we capable of being hospitable -- without vested interest -- in a world that seems, till today, to be so governed by hostility. Quite paradoxically, the concepts of hostility and hospitality relate to each other so closely, but we also find the former to be so easily misconstrued as the latter.

The series of interview questions before Goreng was allowed to habituate in The Pit as a volunteer mirrors the checks we must do at airports upon entrance to countries -- there is a standard, or minimum expectation, of a guest entering into the 'home' of another. What can you offer to our home if we let you in? Will you be a threat to our authority? Will you abide by our systems and rules? The question begs: but can we really choose our society? If we do choose, what kind of society is this now?

Sounds pretty Nazi if you ask me (albeit exaggerated).

Such 'interviews' (verbally or silently conducted) continue in every facet of our lives -- the phase 1 of job applications, our choice of friends, our choice of government, even our choice of who we want to be. Quite amusingly, hotels (by nature of its service) our acclaimed #queens of hospitality likewise greet you from the very get-go of your entrance with a survey of your credit card details, just to make sure you can pay and we're hospitable to the right people, I'm sure you understand this is just protocol :)

Our world is all about hierarchies and being cautious about maintaining the system where things are the best they can be for the majority (?) of us. It seems to me that hospitality must always come with some form of hostility -- we cannot welcome anyone and everyone -- and therein lies a necessary paradox, a resolution for it being quite impossible to reach. If we let everyone in, then there are bound to be leeches and (wait for it...) Parasites who drag/disrupt the well-functioning system. But if you create boundaries, then there we have the "people at the top" and "people at the bottom", we have discrimination, we create categories of the undesirables, and hence hostility arises in face of fear of being associated with, or dragged down by these people existing at the fringes of a system claiming to support 'hospitality'.

In my opinion, the condition of impossibility implicate the entire film, such that even the film cannot find its own ending -- a convenient "open ending left for your imagination to fill", only it is not out of convenience that it is left open, but simply because no one has the answer to the proposed problems in the film yet. If there was indeed a resolution to the paradox of human hospitality, we would already have practiced it in reality and so many social problems could have been avoided.

The impossibility of resolving the film, and hence this paradox, leaves us no respite to cling onto. Our system cannot escape from this necessary paradox. The only way to arrive at a solution is to conceive of a new way of approaching hospitality, a way that insists little on authoritative structures, and instead on the human capacity to accept difference and solidarity in our choices -- an idea flirted with in the film, where The Pit is meant to foster a "spontaneous sense of solidarity" in its inmates (an experiment that obviously failed, BIG TIME).

The sad reality is that it is quite difficult to conceive of anything outside a language, an instinct, a system that we have been shaped by the very moment we were born.

I cannot think of a more appropriate poem to this sentiment than John Donn's No man is an Island,

Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

The Platform urges a very dark way into a more accepting, more effective way of performing humane civility and morality in the world by means of displaying an unapologetic image of how our capitalist system and how it has turned us into a dog-eat-dog, human-eat-human (ugh) world. A cry, and urgent need for us to reconsider our place, our individual assertions to possessions as secondary importance to opening to sharing. For he who dies ultimately foreshadows the death of you.

Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia's The Platform is categorised as a sci-fi, psycho-thriller, horror R21 movie on Netflix, however I find it difficult to set clear limits to its classification. Various drawers in the store of genres present equal capacity to hold the weight of this movie -- just like how The Platform isn't able to provide us an answer in its ending, its very form cannot provide us an unambiguous mode towards framing, compartmentalising it. And this is much like Alex Garland's Annihilation, or even the Spierigs' Predestination; the difference is The Platform has nailed in all angles the element of true fucked-up-ness.