The platform starts full. By the time it reaches you, it is not.
That is the whole engine of The Platform, Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s 2019 Spanish thriller, and it is a good one. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the People’s Choice Award for Midnight Madness and secured a worldwide streaming deal with Netflix. Festival Films released it in Spanish theaters on 8 November 2019.
Trailer, via Netflix.
The Vertical Self-Management Center
The setting is a tower. The film calls it the Vertical Self-Management Center. Residents are imprisoned there as punishment for crimes. Every month they are reassigned to a new level, and every day a platform loaded with food descends from level 0, stopping for two minutes on each floor.
Eat while it is stopped. Keep anything and the temperature turns fatal. That is the only rule that matters, and it is enough.
Because the people above eat first, the people below get less. At the top there is plenty. At the bottom there is nothing. The film’s tagline says it plainly: “There are 3 kinds of people; the ones above, the ones below, and the ones who fall.”
Goreng Wakes on Level 48
Iván Massagué plays Goreng, who wakes in a cell numbered 48. His cellmate is Trimagasi, played by Zorion Eguileor, who explains the arrangement and does not soften it.
Goreng says he volunteered for six months in exchange for a diploma. Trimagasi says he is serving a year for manslaughter. Neither statement buys the other any trust.
Trimagasi also admits that on level 132 he and a former cellmate ate another prisoner. The film does not treat this as a twist. It treats it as weather.
Miharu Rides the Platform Down
A woman named Miharu, played by Alexandra Masangkay, rides the platform downward through the pit. Trimagasi says she descends regularly to search for her child. That is all the film gives you about her at first, and it is enough to make her the most interesting person on screen.
When the reassignment comes, Goreng and Trimagasi land on level 171. Trimagasi ties Goreng up and starts cutting into his leg. Miharu arrives, attacks Trimagasi, and frees him. Goreng kills Trimagasi.
Then he eats him, urged on by Miharu. After that, Trimagasi keeps showing up as a hallucination. The film is better when it lets that haunt Goreng quietly than when it explains itself.
Imoguiri and Ramesses II
The next month puts Goreng on level 33 with Imoguiri, played by Antonia San Juan, and her dog, Ramesses II. Imoguiri is the administration official who interviewed Goreng before he entered the pit. She admitted herself after a terminal cancer diagnosis.
She eats every other day and feeds the dog on the days she does not. She tries to talk the pair below them into rationing. It does not work. That failure is the film’s clearest argument: the system does not need cruelty to function, only appetite.
Miharu arrives injured. Goreng and Imoguiri nurse her back to health. That night, Goreng breaks up a fight between Miharu and Imoguiri.
A Rebellion Is Imminent
The Platform runs 95 minutes, written by Pedro Rivero and David Desola, and it does not waste them. The genre labels — drama, science fiction, thriller — all apply, but the film is really a locked-room argument that keeps changing the room.
The cast around Massagué is small and precise: Eguileor as Trimagasi, San Juan as Imoguiri, Emilio Buale as Baharat, Masangkay as Miharu, Zihara Llana as Mali, Mario Pardo as Baharat’s Friend, Txubio Fernández de Jáuregui as Chef.
The premise does the heavy lifting. A single vertical line, a fixed amount of food, and a monthly lottery that decides who eats. You do not need to be told what it is about.
What the Tower Actually Proves
Here is where The Platform earns its reputation and where it stops short of more.
The best idea in the film is not the starvation. It is the reassignment. Everyone in the tower knows they might be below next month, and they still eat. Gaztelu-Urrutia understands that a system survives on short memory and short months, and he films the platform’s descent like a countdown.
The weaker idea is the math. The film wants you to believe the tower could feed everyone if people rationed, and Imoguiri says as much. But the movie never quite shows you the arithmetic, and the levels keep shifting, so the moral case rests on a number the audience never gets to check. That is a real gap, not a nitpick.
The hallucinations are the other soft spot. Trimagasi returning to needle Goreng gives Eguileor a second pass at the role, and he is good at it, but the device mostly restates what the platform already said. The film is at its sharpest when it stays literal: a slab, a level, two minutes, a man deciding whether to take more than his share.
What holds it together is Massagué. Goreng starts as a volunteer with a diploma waiting for him and ends as something the tower made. The performance does not announce the change. It just lets you watch it happen, which is harder.
The Platform is not subtle. It is not trying to be. It is a clean, mean machine about scarcity and the people who convince themselves they had no choice.
That is worth 95 minutes. It is also worth noticing that the film’s tagline — the one about the ones above, the ones below, and the ones who fall — describes a hierarchy. The movie’s actual subject is the ones in the middle, who could stop it, and do not.
KEY FACTS
- Title: The Platform (Spanish: El hoyo)
- Year: 2019
- Director: Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia
- Writers: Pedro Rivero, David Desola
- Runtime: 95 minutes
- Genres: Drama, Science Fiction, Thriller
- Premiere: 2019 Toronto International Film Festival
- Award: People’s Choice Award for Midnight Madness, TIFF
- Spanish theatrical release: 8 November 2019, Festival Films
- Metacritic: 73/100
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