Sometimes, a movie comes along that just blows your mind. It’s unexpected and exciting — you’ve never seen anything like it before, and you can’t help but turn into an unpaid walking billboard, advertising it to everyone you know. That’s me with The Platform.
Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s stunning Spanish science fiction/horror/fantasy/thriller/you-name-it film is about a grimy futuristic prison consisting of an immense vertical shaft where the prisoners live stacked above each other and dependent on each other in grotesque ways.
It’s part cleverly conceived yet nightmarish metaphor for wealth inequity, part claustrophobia drama, and part gory shock-and-awe horror movie. The whole film is a series of surprise reveals and tiny, telling discoveries — not so much M. Night Shyamalan “This changes everything!” revelations as a series of small, painful knife-in-a-wound story twists. It’s a fabulous experience, a breathless and sometimes terrifyingly tense movie with a winning sense of dark comedy on top of everything else.
That leaves me both excited for and admittedly dubious about The Platform 2, Netflix’s upcoming sequel. How do you follow up something so unique, surprising, weird, and built around discovery?
The first teaser trailer for The Platform 2 just dropped, and it goes hard — it’s just a full-bore barrage of shocking, striking images — suggesting that the movie has its own unique identity rather than just being a retread.
The sequel is built around a new protagonist and a new situation, but it returns to the same mind-bending prison. Gaztelu-Urrutia is back in the director’s chair, and original writers David Desola and Pedro Rivero are back as well, alongside another Spanish writer, Egoitz Moreno. Here’s Netflix’s description:
As a mysterious leader imposes their rule in the Platform, a new resident becomes embroiled in the battle against this controversial method to fight the brutal feeding system. But when eating from the wrong plate becomes a death sentence, how far would you be willing to go to save your life?
The Platform 2 is set for release on Netflix on October 4.
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