Tuesday 27 October 2020

El Hoyo (Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia, 2019)


To describe The Platform as a dystopian prison film is at once reductionist and misleading. It's so much more than that. The premise is that prisoners exist two per cell in a stack of an unknown number of cells, depending each day on a platform of food that passes from the ceiling to the floor of their cell for sustenance, with the catch that they can only cram in the butchered scraps what the occupiers of the floors above haven't managed to eat yet, and each month they find themselves transferred in drugged sleep to another, randomly-assigned level. The concept is brutalising by its very nature: if they find themselves on level 100 rather than level 10, starvation is more than likely, and desperation will lead to any means necessary to survive, as far as cannibalism. 
Having thus utterly grossed out the audience, and in a novel manner too, many directors could consider their work done. Not so Gaztelu-Urrutia, for this is a deeply serious film, making an incendiary point not just about social stratification, which is obvious, but the fallacy of trickle-down economics and the ridiculous inadequacy of religion as a comfort to boot. You won't have seen anything like it before, and its damning message haunts the mind long after the gore has faded.

8/10

 

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