Hang on to your Jack-o'-lanterns, Netflix subscribers; Halloween month is here and the streaming service is serving up one of the year’s most anticipated horror sequels this Friday.
In March 2020 – yep, that memorable month – Netflix blessed its catalogue with a Spanish dystopian horror that became a regular fixture in its global ‘Top 10’ list over the following weeks – no doubt popularised in part due to its close-to-home social commentary during that difficult lockdown period for humanity. It was a bleak and disgusting yet captivating watch that combined political and social-economic allegory with human gluttony – and was not one for an empty (or for that matter, very full) stomach. Put your guess in the hat?
It was The Platform, ladies and gentlemen. The movie has a current Rotten Tomatoes score of 81 per cent, with its Critic Consensus describing it as “ an inventive and captivating dystopian thriller”. The Guardian called it a “gruesomely effective Spanish fable”, while The New York Times heralded it as “a gnarly mash-up of midnight movie and social commentary”.
On Friday, the sequel lands on Netflix to put you royally off your weekend takeaway. So what can we expect?
Holding a big, gleaming mirror up to our society, The Platform centred around a “Vertical Self-Management Center" and its prisoners, who are placed on a different level of the tower block per month and are fed only via a single platform that descends a buffet feast of food down to each level, where it stops for only two minutes. If the food has all been finished by the time it reaches your level, tough luck – you better hope you’re on a higher level next month. Chaos, extreme egotism and trickery ensue, as well as a fair share of murder, cannibalism and falling to one’s death.
The Platform 2 sticks to the ingeniously simple concept: food descends, hungry people eat, others go hungry. Only this time, a ‘law’ states that each resident chooses a dish that others cannot touch, to ensure everyone gets fed. If the trailer is anything to go by, this seemingly ‘fairer’ rule only dials up the ‘hangry’ chaos to eleven as the individual and double-team victories of the original escalate into multi-level revolutions in this sequel. Honestly, it looks bonkers. And the fact that the same director (Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia) and writers (David Desola and Pedro Rivero) are behind it again gives us faith that, while it won’t be as conceptually fresh, it could well reach new levels of darkness. Tee it up!
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