The Platform goes to the next level

GOING UP . . . NO DOWN: Ivan Massague as Goreng (left) and Zorion Eguileor as his floor-mate Trimagasi are presented with a slab laden with picked-over food in the immaculately dubbed Spanish film, The Platform. Pickings become slimmer or more bountiful as inmates wake to find themselves on a new level. Picture supplied

Two men share a grey, stone-walled floor in a tower that has more than 200 identical levels, each shared by two people, in Netflix film The Platform.

A large rectangular hole in the centre of each level creates a kind of atrium through which a platform descends with meal remains left from the tenants from higher levels.

Each inmate is allowed to take with them a single object.

The political and social allegory in the nature of the tower's Kafka-esque hierarchy in which those above are contemptuous of those below is not hammered home.

Instead, it rests on an existential, internal logic that is closer to the nature of the theatre of the absurd than the Hollywood morality formula.

The main character Goreng is a voluntary inmate.

He wants space and time to read Cervantes' Don Quixote. His floor-mate, Trimagasi, has taken with him a self-sharpening knife.

As the institution's inmates wake from time to time to find themselves on a new level, Trimagasi's knife becomes more ominous when the pair find themselves on a much lower floor.

Because the platform starts off near over-flowing with five star cuisine, but is left with overturned silverware and drained wine bottles as it reaches the lower levels, cannibalism is inevitable.

The film's flashes of goriness are not presented in the manner of schlock-horror movies like The Texas Chainsaw Murderer, or Saw, though, but dark humour.

Mostly dark humour.

As two inmates, including Goreng, embark on a symbolic, but risky, revolutionary gesture the story deepens, literally, and darkens while the violence, it turns out, is for the social good.

Central to the story is Miharu, a ferocious, badly-treated, young woman who travels the floors via the platform in search of her child.

And we will leave it there, except to say there are no twists in the story but for such a stripped back setting and plot, a lot happens from moment to moment.

The acting is superb and is different from what we're familiar with in the usual movie fodder, but just how is difficult to define.

Perhaps it is because at heart this film is closer to theatre than regular movies, Perhaps it is because The Platform (El Horo) is a Spanish film and is free of the formula we are accustomed to. Voices are dubbed but immaculately so.

Norman Wilner of Now wrote the film “has everything: low comedy, political allegory, left-field twists, crowd-pleasing surprises, spectacular violence, sadism, altruism and yet more spectacular violence, all wrapped up in a high-concept horror movie that moves the premise of Cube into a merciless vertical structure. It's grotesque and compelling, like grindhouse Buñuel. And it never blinks.”

Rotten Tomatoes registers an approval rating of 83 percent for the film

The Platform will not be everyone's cuppa but it is engaging with occasional laugh-out-loud moments and plenty to chew on.