The Platform

Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia puts every rule of his pit on the table at the outset and then adds none. Tension comes from repetition rather than discovery: the mechanism restarts each month, and the only new variables are which floor you wake on and who is put in with you. Viewers hoping for a puzzle that unfolds get a diagram instead, and the abrupt way people vanish is a product of that design, since each stretch reruns one experiment with a fresh input. Only two tiers of the shaft physically existed. The concrete cells were built inside a Red Cross building at the port of Bilbao, and the endless column above and below was added afterwards. The screenplay came from an unstaged theatre text by David Desola and Pedro Rivero whose second act was the end of the play, so the third act belongs to the film alone. Ivan Massagué and Antonia San Juan were both known at home as comic performers, which is precisely why they were cast. A good fit if you want that third act, the descent with no stage original behind it, and do not mind a film that states its thesis aloud. Not a fit if you cannot sit through a banquet filmed to look appetising and then deliberately spoiled, month after month.