The Platform (2019)

Released in 2019 under its original Spanish title El hoyo (which translates simply as "The Hole"), The Platform arrives from the Basque Country and represents a debut feature from director Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia. The film is a Spanish production, backed by Basque Films, Mr. Miyagi and regional broadcaster EiTB, and it sits comfortably within a tradition of socially charged Spanish genre cinema that uses extreme or fantastical premises to say something pointed about inequality, class and human nature. The premise is almost elegantly simple: a vertical prison facility, called the Pit, houses two inmates per floor across hundreds of levels. A single platform loaded with food descends from the top, and those at the upper levels eat well while those further down receive whatever remains. The arrangement is brutal, and the film makes no great effort to disguise what it is getting at. It earned considerable attention on the festival circuit before landing on Netflix, where it found a wide international audience.

For a debut feature, the production is polished but unremarkable in its visual vocabulary, leaning on the confined single-location setting to generate tension rather than on any particularly flashy technique. Gaztelu-Urrutia and screenwriters David Desola and Pedro Rivero keep the world-building functional rather than ornate, which is both a strength and, for some viewers, a frustration. The film sits alongside other recent Spanish productions that have found global audiences through streaming, and if you are curious how Spanish cinema handles very different kinds of political or social weight, it is worth comparing it to something like Pacifiction (2022) or the animated historical work Josep (2020), both of which take quite distinct approaches to the same national cinema tradition. For fans of dystopian science fiction more broadly, the film shares a certain stripped-back, survival-focused energy with Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), even if the scale and setting could hardly be more different.

The cast is led by Ivan Massagué, who carries the film as the central protagonist through whose eyes we experience the facility. He is joined by Zorion Eguileor, Antonia San Juan, Emilio Buale and Alexandra Masangkay across the various floor pairings, and the performances throughout are committed and grounded, which matters enormously when the concept itself risks feeling schematic. Eguileor in particular brings a worn, watchful quality to his role that adds genuine unease to the early sections. The 95-minute runtime suggests a tight, purposeful piece of work, and for much of that running time the film delivers on its premise with reasonable confidence.

I've been out to dinner with people worse than this. Honestly though platform is a good premise wrapped up in a "uh oh what next?" dilemma. A platform of food is lowered between hundreds of floors, each with 2 people on them. Those at the top eat heavily. Those at the bottom eat scraps. Every so often the places are switched. The problem is that the finale feels super rushed and abrupt. A common problem with netflix movies. It just ends all of a sudden with no real payoff.

And that abruptness is the thing that lingers, isn't it. For me, the film earns a fair amount of goodwill through its central conceit and the performances holding it together, but the final stretch squanders a chunk of that. It feels like a story that knew where it wanted to start but hadn't quite worked out where to land. There is something a little frustrating about that, because the bones here are genuinely strong. I keep coming back to films that manage to stick the ending as the measure of whether something truly works, and on that count The Platform comes up short. Worth a watch on a wet evening, but don't expect to be chewing it over the next morning.

Rating: ★★½  | Year: 2019  | Watched: 2025-07-01

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Trailer

▶ Watch the official trailer for The Platform (2019) on YouTube

Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon US

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