my Movie

Movie Details

Title:   The Platform
Director:   Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia
Year:   2019
Genre:   Science Fiction
Times Seen:   1
Last Seen:   09.26.19

Other Movies Seen By This Director (0)

Notes History
Date Viewed Venue Note
09.26.19Alamo South LamarThis Screening is part of event: FantasticFest 2019
Day Eight! Last Day!


This is a sci-fi film kind of a la Snowpiercer or Cube or a Richard Bachman book where the characters are in this bizarre environment where a platform full of food starts at level 1 and the two people on that level get a few minutes to eat as much as they want before the platform lowers to level 2, 3, etc., until the lowest levels have no food and have to resort to other means of sustenance. People sign up or get assigned to X amount of months in this complex in exchange for diminished sentences or accredited degrees and they get randomly assigned levels every month.

The heavy message is that supposedly if everyone only eats their share then there's enough but human nature is such that those on the top indulge leaving those on the bottom to starve. Really though it's a maybe a comment on the system in general because we learn that the levels go down way beyond even what rationed food could supply so the whole system is corrupt in addition to people being shitty.

it really did have Long Walk / Running Man vibes to me more than Snowpiercer. I appreciate the lack of context or explanation here. Things don't go particularly well, making it fit right in to the fest. My only complaint is that the second screening didn't get any novelty food pairing like the first screening is.

One criticism of the fest as a whole this year is a general lack of little touches that made previous years special. Things like bringing out a food item at a particular moment in the film (like a hunk of meat during Texas Chainsaw Massacre or something like that) supplies a nice surprise and is a sign of thoughtfulness that make you feel special. The only thing like that I got this year was the free beer from Netflix for their films and a peach gummy in front of Parasite (which was just sitting there and wasn't addressed during the intro at all). I know it's a minor nitpick considering the scope of things they have to deal with to pull the festival off, but I did miss it.

Anyway, I liked this.