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Netflix’s The Platform Eerily Reminiscent of Covid-19 Pandemic
In a dystopian future, prisoners are housed in El Hoyo, a prison made up of vertical jail cells, one stacked on top of another. Each floor is a single room for two, with a gaping hole running down the middle. Once a day, a platform of food lowers through the cells, stopping at timed intervals at each level to give prisoners a chance to have their share of the food (to put it politely). The platform starts as an untouched, decadent feast — wine, cakes, savory delicacies — on level 1, and as it descends lower and lower, it becomes leftovers, then scraps, then nothing at all. When the food runs out, prisoners on those levels are left with nothing to eat.
This is the world that film director, Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia, and screenplay writers, David Desola and Pedro Rivero, depict in The Platform, a sci-fi thriller released on Netflix on March 20, 2020. And this work is as timely as ever. The themes and metaphors that run through the movie draw uncanny parallels to not only issues pervading society, but also to the situation we find ourselves in today with the Covid-19 outbreak. [Spoilers follow].
Every 30 days in El Hoyo, prisoners wake up on a different level. One month, they could be enjoying the stability and certainty of a higher level, and the next, they could find themselves on a lower level, devoid of food. This…
