The platform: a dystopian reality… obviously

"There are three kinds of people: those above, those below and those who fall"

Streaming services are really stepping up the game by making not just entertaining, forgettable content, but actually making just a few movies and TV shows that are actually great compared to an award nominated film. The last award season, movies from Netflix like "The Irishman", "Marriage Story" and "The Two Popes" performed excellently, and even two of them got nominated for best feature film at the oscars. This time, there’s a new movie that amazed me in many ways, and not just made by a streaming service, but a foreign language film. That’s really stepping up a notch to this. The movie I’m talking about, released by Netflix on its streaming service a few weeks ago, is "The Platform".

The spanish movie, directed by Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia is an amazing movie message-wise, that’s not really for everyone to see. The movie is strong, really strong, but it portrays a perspective on society that truly left me speechless, because as awful as it is portrayed in the movie, every single bit is true. The movie is not pleasant to see at all, you feel uncomfortable all the running time, but that is the point and the purpose. You need to feel that pain, you need to be disgusted and repulsed by every single frame, because as I see things, watching a movie is not a passive action, is an active one, because you’re not just an expectator, you need to live the experience and feel it as the director wants you to. Good films make you a part of them, and oh boy this one accomplishes it.

I would describe the movie as a vertical "snowpiercer", because the concepts are very similar, the message is similar, and the vibe of the movie feels as if it is a Bong Joon Ho’s masterpiece, which to say now is a big deal. The premise is simple: It’s a prision, a vertical building with many many floors, where on each floor there are two cellmates who can each bring one object with them. In the middle of the floor, there is a hole, in which every day an elevator passes with food from the top to the bottom, pausing at each floor a few moments so the inmates can eat. Each month the pairs get randomly positioned into a new floor. The problem is that if you are at the top you get tons of food, but if you have the bad luck of being at the lower levels like 171, the elevator arrives with not even a gram of food.

The message it gives is easy, concise, and very very very real: the ones above you won’t listen to you because you are below, and you won’t listen to the ones below because you are above them. That there, as simple and short as it is, explains a big problem of today’s societies: the different social classes, and how they are separated, excluding and being excluded. What’s below doesn’t matter, and what’s above doesn’t care about you. This, once more, sounds like Bong Joon Ho’s words out of "Parasite".

What really blew my mind is the fact that the positions weren’t fixed, but they changed every month, so maybe you are on level 4, but then you end up on level 201, without any food or help. One would think that this uncertainty would make the prisoners be more polite, thoughtful or empathic to the rest, but no, that didn’t affect them at all. Their argument was: “I can spit to the ones beneath me because next month they’ll be above me and spit me as well, those damn.” WHAT? Please someone explain to me why no one acts in the best of all? Why are we so selfish? Because be sincere, this isn’t fantasy, this is a raw reflection of what happens in our societies. You may not feel like so because simply if you are reading this you have an electronic device and access to the internet, so you are on the higher levels. Think for a second how it has been on the floor 100 or on the floor 250 is.

In the movie there’s an idea proposed that this horrible situation will continue until there is a “spontaneous solidarity”. Why can’t something like that exist? Why does the world need to work with the rules that those on the top will depreciate those beneath, with no importance if they know what is like being down there? We have to change, society has to change, because what made me the most uncomfortable watching the movie wasn’t the blood, how they eat other humans, or the suffering there is, but how identified I felt with those behaviours and the resemblance they have with reality.