Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia
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It looks a lot like a more realism-drenched version of Vincenzo Natali’s claustrophobia-inflected 1997 feature Cube, with a similar sense that there are a lot of grand, echoing mysteries to explore.
Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s feature-length debut is a supremely confident genre mash-up that fuses the mysterious-prison conceit of Canadian classic Cube with the tongue-in-cheek social commentary of Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer before slathering it all with torn strips of flesh and buckets of blood.
There are ways of making this work, presumably; the film isn't so far removed from the cult classic Cube from 1997, which if anything makes even less sense as anything but an extended metaphor.
A pitch in search of a movie to ground it, Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s The Platform never amounts to more than the sum of its parts, but fans of high-concept science fiction such as Cube and Snowpiercer may nevertheless appreciate the sheer number of those parts in a film that teems with ideas, but ultimately fails to commit to them.
However, if you’ve seen “Snowpiercer,” not to mention “Cube,” “Saw,” not much feels fresh in “The Platform,” its “bottle” concept not necessarily new cinematic DNA ditto its upstairs/downstairs socialist allegory.
Much like 1997’s Cube, his film never looks chintzy.
Much as with Bong Joon-Ho’s Snowpiercer , the allegory is unmissable, without throttling the action.
As Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer and Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise so exquisitely pull the curtain back on humanity’s cruelest impulses, Urrutia embraces dystopian monstrosity through elementary necessities.
Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s feature-length debut is a supremely confident genre mash-up that fuses the mysterious-prison conceit of Canadian classic Cube with the tongue-in-cheek social commentary of Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer before slathering it all with torn strips of flesh and buckets of blood.
South Korean director Bong Joon Ho certainly didn't invent the class-based science-fiction parable with Snowpiercer , his acclaimed 2014 thriller about a bloody armed revolt on a speeding train arranged so the poor residents rot in the back and the rich elites luxuriate in the front cars.
The Platform is an incendiary commentary on the state of affairs around the world with a similar cry to action as Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer.
While even admirers of The Platform upon those early screenings might have somewhat glibly summarized the film as a “vertical Snowpiercer ”, what we see now as March 2020 draws to a close and The Platform is about to become readily accessible to self-isolated and quarantined audiences is something altogether weightier.
Still, given the prominence of Goreng’s paperback copy of “Don Quixote,” it’s surprising Lecter didn’t lean more on Miguel de Cervantes’ apropos quotations.
Goreng (Ivan Massagué) is confused because he thought he was volunteering six months of his life to the “Administration” in order to receive the peace and quiet necessary to quit smoking and read Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote .
Massagué and Eguileor are up to being in a zesty “Waiting for Godot.”
Initially, the film unfolds like a two-man play, somewhere between the aimless comedic circles of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot , and the helpless hell-is-other-people hostility of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit .
But while the bizarre setting of the movie recalls head-trip cult favorites like Cube or 2015’s Circle, it turns out that Goreng knows exactly how he got where he is: He volunteered.
Much like the Spanish film The Platform, simplicity is key in depicting this metaphor of America's obsession with chasing wealth.
Fans of Stephen King and death game stories like The Hunger Games, Squid Game, and The Platform will surely enjoy this movie.
En 1998, Cube se alzaba con el máximo reconocimiento de Sitges, tras el éxito de su cortometraje Elevated .
Some moments play like Pier Paolo Pasolini (Salo) having a chuckle, others like Eli Roth (Hostel, Cabin Fever) on methamphetamine, or as if Gareth Evans (The Raid) had lost his dang mind.
If Denis Villeneuve’s brilliant short film Next Floor mated with Vincenzo Natali’s Cube , the result would be The Platform .
As Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer and Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise so exquisitely pull the curtain back on humanity’s cruelest impulses, Urrutia embraces dystopian monstrosity through elementary necessities.
A film like Parasite, or Ben Wheatley's frenzied J.G. Ballard adaptation High Rise , succeeds in part because the relationships are elegantly built out and as obsessed over as the twists.
Although the Spanish have plenty of form with genre breakout hits ( The Orphanage , Rec , Timecrimes ), The Platform takes inspiration from all over: the pared-down, claustrophobic and smartly utilised set recalls cult Canadian horror Cube and Bong Joon-ho's masterful Snowpiercer ; there's more than a smattering of the sadism of films like Saw ; and it all gets a little bit The Raid -esque in its nail-biting, punchy and propulsive denouement.
Before The Platform premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival this past September, I was convinced that it would send certain audiences into convulsive shock – the same kind that reportedly greeted two moviegoers during a TIFF screening of the French cannibalism flick Raw in 2016.
Like “Cube,” “Saw,” and even “The Exterminating Angel” before it, “The Platform” is the sort of (largely) single-location horror movie that’s defined by its premise.
Some moments play like Pier Paolo Pasolini (Salo) having a chuckle, others like Eli Roth (Hostel, Cabin Fever) on methamphetamine, or as if Gareth Evans (The Raid) had lost his dang mind.
This is the type of movie, like Christopher Nolan's far bigger budgeted Inception , where everyone is always laying out exactly what they are and why they do what they do.
The continuous disappointment of The Platform calls to mind the inauspicious start of another socially-conscious horror series, The Purge .
We already witnessed a few of them in movies like Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) and Us (2019) and of course, this year’s The Platform.