Both its release date (March 2020) and subject matter (people living in enforced confinement, scrapping over food and supplies) conspired to make Spanish thriller The Platform a pandemic mega-hit for Netflix four years ago. The streaming giant will be hoping that this follow-up — which hurls us back into the nightmarish tower-block prison dubbed ‘The Pit’ — might bank similar record-breaking viewing-figure returns. Sadly, on the strength of the film's quality alone, that seems unlikely.
Before we get to the meat of this confounding sequel-or-is-it-a-prequel (more on that confusion in a moment), a brief recap for those who might have missed the first outing. The Pit — also known by its more PR-friendly title ‘The Vertical Self-Management Centre’ — is a 333-floor jail, featuring two cellmates per floor. Once a day, a floating platform containing a vast, medieval-style banquet (suckling pigs, roast chickens, ten-tier cream cakes, you name it) descends from the very top to the very bottom, stopping briefly at each floor. Inmates are permitted to gorge themselves on as much grub as they can while it's there, meaning those on the upper levels typically dine like kings, while anyone below Floor 50 is choosing between starvation or cannibalism. Here's the kick, though: each month, prisoners are drugged and reassigned a new level in their sleep, meaning fortunes are constantly shifting and those who have just been punished by the greed of their higher-ups are able to exact revenge by leaving them nothing but scraps, too.
The Platform 2 dissolves into a bloated, murky haze, with Gaztelu-Urrutia chucking prison riots, dream sequences, bizarre flashbacks and reams and reams of increasingly knotty Pit lore into the mix...
The brilliance of the concept as both an allegory for capitalism and an entertainingly grisly thought experiment made the first film a deserved hit. But where that movie felt lean and fresh and focused, returning director Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia stuffs his follow-up with too many half-formed characters and ambiguous-to-the-point-of-frustrating ideas.
As The Platform 2 opens, the vibe in The Pit feels not dissimilar to that of King's Landing when the fanatically religious ‘Sparrows’ take the city in Game Of Thrones' fifth season. A seemingly more egalitarian regime — dubbed ‘The Law’ — has been enforced in the prison, in which each individual must eat only the food allocated to them. The Law is brutally upheld by the ‘Anointed Ones’ — a group of violent fundamentalist inmates, led by a sightless zealot named Dagin Babi (Óscar Jaenada). Initially, our new heroine Perempuan (Milena Smit) — a tortured artist with an infuriatingly perplexing backstory — is on board with The Law, even convincing her hulking, hairy-backed cellmate Zamiatin (Hovik Keuchkerian) to toe the line after some bastard on the higher levels eats his pizza. But once she’s reassigned to Floor 180, with a new roommate who lost her arm after falling foul of the Anointed Ones, Perempuan finds herself on the wrong side of a civil war against them.
From here, The Platform 2 dissolves into a bloated, murky haze, with Gaztelu-Urrutia chucking prison riots, dream sequences, bizarre flashbacks and reams and reams of increasingly knotty Pit lore into the mix, never seeming quite sure of his satirical target — capitalism? Communism? Religion? All three? At one point, a sudden, surprising callback to the first film suggests that this follow-up is in fact a prequel rather than a sequel, but by the end of the movie, the timeline is so unclear that it could be either. And you may find you're not invested enough in the story to truly care.
Despite that, there are standout moments here — Harry Potter star Natalia Tena is great as Perempuan’s wild-eyed (and one-armed) bunkmate. Plus, a third-act exploration of the drug-induced process of floor reassignment provides a staggering set-piece that recalls some of the more jaw-dropping moments in Inception. But it all comes a little too late in the day to really reignite your interest. As the titles roll, a mystifying mid-credits sting suggests that ‘The Platform 3’ may soon be incoming. But most viewers may find themselves wanting to disembark at this floor, rather than ride any further.