Stream It Or Skip It?

As one of the few people who found 2020’s The Platform too disgusting for its own good, I feel the need to share that the prospect of watching The Platform 2 (now on Netflix) was akin to sitting down to chow a big pile of botulism. The first film, a Spanish, high-concept sci-fi/horror blecchfest, was an early-pandemic-era Netflix hit that fed us heavy-handed allegories for capitalism and social hierarchies, spicing them up with brutal violence including, but not limited to – not by a damn stretch – cannibalism. Many people liked the film’s dystopian thought-experiment conceit (81 percent on the Tomatometer), but the sequel complicates the relatively simple core idea until it’s so absurdly tangled, I just wanted to check out.

The Gist: Before I get to how the characters in this movie spend inordinate amounts of time explaining, explaining, explaining things, I’ll do something it fails to do: Explaining the core concept again, in case you need a refresher on a movie you may not have seen since 2020. So there’s this prison dubbed The Pit, and it has 333 levels, two people on each level (a little basic multiplication tells us that this is a Hell-like place). Don’t ask how or why people end up here, because the answer is so vague it’s a nonstarter. Once a day, a platform full of succulent foodstuffs lowers from level to level, and as these things go, the people at the upper levels get to eat and those farther down are either gonna resort to cannibalism or starve. The platform stops for two minutes per level. If anyone tries to stash food, they’ll be baked or frozen alive. Once a month, everyone who isn’t dead is shuffled to a different level. And since this is a trickle-down system (nudge nudge), everyone lives happily ever after!

Or not. The new wrinkle in the sequel is, the prisoners have begun policing themselves. They’ve established The Law, which states that you only eat the one food item you requested at the beginning of your incarceration. That way, everyone from level 0 to 333 should, theoretically, get to eat. Easier said than done? Of course, since some adhere to The Law and some don’t give a damn. Where this all gets dicey is, some moron introduced religion into this society, complete with a messiah-myth about a man who kept others alive by feeding them bits of his own flesh (if it were up to me, his nickname would be Hey Zeus). Even worse, there ain’t much of a line between church and state, since The Law is enforced by a blind prophet-type and his zealot followers. Yes, you may sigh deeply now.

The main character in this milieu is Perempuan (Milena Smit), an artist with a tortured backstory that’s doled out in tiny bits hither and thither via flashbacks. The food she picked? Croquettes. I think that says something about her? She’s initially paired with a giant fella named Zamiatin (Hovik Keuchkerian), who loves him a meat lover’s pizza. Things happen – even if I fully understood these many, many confusing things, I wouldn’t dream of spoiling them – and the platform is ridden down and levels are shuffled and disturbingly bloody violence erupts among the prisoners and Perempuan ends up with another roomie (Natalia Tena of Harry Potter and Game of Thrones fame), who chose plums as her food. What kind of maniac chooses plums to eat every day for lord knows how many months? I am thus distracted, from the premise and the characters and the allegories and the far-too-many callbacks to the first film. Plums? Really?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: It had better remind you of The Platform, because if you didn’t watch it milliseconds prior to The Platform 2, you have little chance of comprehending the sequel. Anyhow: this is once again a Cubeish concept crossed with Sawish torture porn.  

Performance Worth Watching: Smit has significant screen presence, as we saw in Almodovar’s stunning Parallel Mothers, which you should absolutely watch instead of this. 

Memorable Dialogue: Zamiatan has no space for dreams in his life: “Imaginary things don’t exist. And they do nothing for me.”

Sex and Skin: A little T, a little A, a brief long shot of a P.

Our Take: The first Platform took a pretty damn good premise and splattered it with blood and viscera until it was considerably less good. The Platform 2 exacerbates the Miserable Shit tone and aesthetic of its predecessor by maintaining its grim humorlessness and a visual palette that makes you feel like you’re staring at a gray concrete wall for 100 minutes. The insides of the characters are just as bland, riddled with self-loathing and the type of trite backstories that are so sketchy, it’s obvious the filmmakers spent significant amounts of time nurturing the concept like a precious infant child while letting the actual people in their story wither and droop like neglected grapes on a vine.

As for making sense of this story – it probably can be done, if you care to parse details from the first film and ponder how and why they’re integrated into the sequel, like the filmmakers are attempting to develop a Marvel Cinematic Universe of Miserable Shit. The core idea isn’t a terrible one to explore, that The Law doesn’t apply equally to everyone in The Pit, especially when the trickle-down effect is staunched by one greedy bastard, or when religious zealots begin doling out violent punishment. But the film distracts us from the allegory with gore (that’s admittedly less stomach-churning than in the first film) and the non-starter emotional sweepstakes of Perempuan’s plight. The third act devolves into a wholly expected, intensely bloody showdown between prisoner factions, and a dream-state sequence that might be literal or might be figurative but isn’t worth interpreting, because very little that preceded it made sense. And by then, if you make it that far, you’re more likely to be stupefied than enlightened.

Our Call: SKIP IT. The Platform 2 exists to remind us that society still sucks. Stop me if you’ve heard that one before.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.