The Platform

A vertical prison. Two people per level. A platform of food descends from the top and each level eats what the one above left.

The metaphor is a brick and the film knows it, which is why it stops arguing about it after twenty minutes and starts working out what people actually do inside the system.

Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia shoots it in a single concrete cell repeated hundreds of times, and the level changes each month are the structure: you wake up somewhere new, and your morality is entirely a function of the number on the wall.

Iván Massagué is very good and the film is much funnier than its reputation for the first half.

The last twenty minutes lose the thread and reach for a symbol they cannot land. Everything before that is excellent.