THE PLATFORM Trailer Imagines A Nightmarish Class-Warfare Scenario

Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia's The Platform (also known as El Hoyo in its country of origin) was one of the best things I saw at last year's Fantastic Fest, a brutal and thought-provoking little sci-fi thriller that worked its way well under my skin and has remained there ever since. Today, we've got the films first trailer to share with you, but before we get to that - lemme tell you what The Platform is about.

The premise is deceptively simple: somewhere out there is an entirely vertical prison, each floor being a cell containing two people. The floor and ceiling of each cell are open, allowing upper floors to look down at lower floors (and vice versa). Once a day, a platform covered in food lowers itself through each floor of the prison, stopping just long enough for each cell to feast on whatever's there. As you can imagine, the platform has plenty of food when it starts its journey...but contains nothing but scraps by the time it reaches the lower floors. Good news for the upper floors, right? Well, not entirely. See, every once in a while, the floors of the prison change position: one month you might be at the top of the structure, with access to whatever you'd like. A few weeks later you might find yourself thirty stories below, picking over bones and bread crusts. 

So, yeah, it's an allegory about class warfare. And it fucking rules.

How many floors does the prison have? What happens when the food runs out? Is it possible to escape? The Platform answers these questions and more over the course of its running time, and what a movie it is. Sure, some of it's pretty on the nose, and yeah, you've definitely seen contained allegorical thrillers like this before, but The Platform is elevated (har!) by a number of very effective performances, and the script is razor-sharp all the way through (the way Gaztelu-Urrutia's doles out information about the prison is particularly fun; you'll learn something new about this environment every few minutes or so, and the details are very compelling, indeed). Y'all are gonna enjoy this one.

And guess what? You're not gonna have to wait too much longer to see it! The Platform hits Netflix on March 20th. Go ahead and mark your calendars now.