I've watched tonnes of movies/shows since the Restricted Movement Order (RMO) came into effect here in Malaysia. Netflix and other 'streaming websites' seem to be the channel of choice rather than mainstream TV channels (I was getting a bit worn out hearing all of those things about the infection getting worse in some parts of the world). One of the movie that caught my attention was Netflix's The Platform.
I never planned to watch it but i was immediately drawn to it since Netflix had marked it as being one of the Top 10 shows at the moment on its platform. When did Netflix give rankings to its show? I seem to have missed this entirely before.
Anyway, back to the show. I initially had that tiny cloud of doubt in my mind that this might turn out to be yet another 'Bird Box' type of Netflix movie and I can never get back that 2 hour spent watching another senseless movie. But I was wrong. The acting in The Platform was top notch. Not that I know any of the actors/actresses who speaks Spanish all the time (well, it IS a Spanish movie) but their acting was excellent and on par with the mainstream actors you've seen in many Oscar-worthy movies.
It tells you the story of a man called Goreng (yes, I know that his name alone shall spur many laughter among us Bahasa-speaking people....it means 'fry', as in frying chicken or fish or 'to con' as per our street language) who was admitted into a prison called The Hole. We later learnt that his admission was voluntarily but I'm not gonna go into that.
The Hole is a multi-storey prison building which we initially learnt was a 150-storey facility with a large hole in the middle big enough to accomodate a platform that carries a smorgasbord of food daily for all of the inmates. Yes, for ALL of the inmates. The platform makes its way from the top floor (floor 'zero' was where the 'chefs' load the platform) before making its way down to floor no 2, 3 and so on so forth. The higher the inmates were, the better chances of them to eat whatever they want first. As the platform descends down, we see that the lower level inmates get to eat whatever's not eaten by the floors above them.
Inmates get to stay at where they are for a month before they get rotated to another cell/level. So the lower you go, the less chances for food. You get the idea.
Some inmates fall to their death like the ones pictures above. It gets even scarier as our protagonist discovered that the facility can reach 250 floors below. Goreng's first inmate resorted to slice him off his flesh for the lack of food but soon our protagonist even resorted to cannibalism as well. Things got even crazier as he changes inmates and more revelations came his way.
There was also this crazy lady who hopped onto the platform as it makes its way down, presumably to find her daughter. It does not make senses at that particular point of time because no prisoner below 16 years of age was allowed in the facility.
It was his third cell buddy who finally convince Goreng to descend down to the lowest floor and send back one untouched meal back to the administrators as a sign of protest (for the lack of food for the lower cells). What they found at the very bottom was the crazy lady's daughter which can only man that the prison administration did not adhere at all to its 'above 16-years old, only rule.
Along the way Goreng had many hallucinations and at times even I had difficulties to tel which one real and which one was dreamt up by the protagonist.
Metaphorically, The Platform tells us about how the rich stays rich and people who are at the bottom of the social hierarchy chain could only get what the people above do not want. Ideally, co-existing is the only way to ensure even those at the lowest of low get what they need but in reality this does not happen at all.
That is what The Platform is trying to show us.
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