The feature debut of Spanish director Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia, The Platform is set in a stark, brutalist prison that’s decided to go very high-concept. It’s a vertical tower of cement cubes, with a central dumbwaiter that each day is lowered with a enormous buffet. There’s technically enough on it for everyone to eat well enough, but with the upper levels getting to gorge themselves first, the bottom levels often starve. Them’s the trickle-down economic breaks! Capitalism, right?
There’s an obvious comparison to be made with Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer‘s very literal, linear, gross-eating class system. But given that everyone there is a prisoner, those better off screwing over their own peers, it looks like there’s some meat of Bong’s Parasite‘s impoverished infighting left on those bones, too.
Anyway, if you want to watch an old man greedily stuff himself in a dank cell—and who wouldn’t?—The Platform hits Netflix March 20.
