There is a rare kind of poetic irony to be found in the release of Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s The Platform.

At any other time, his film would’ve been largely forgotten – celebrated by a handful of self-proclaimed “film connoisseurs,” but invisible, for the most part, to everyone else. After all, the three immediate phrases that come to mind for this film – “low-budget,” “unknown actors” and “foreign” – aren’t exactly the three that made Avengers: Endgame slaughter Avatar.

Alas, this is no ordinary time, evidently. Countries are under lock-down, industries are crashing, biscuits are scarce and toilet paper, God forbid, even scarcer. Both Mother Nature and state-sponsored stupidity deserve some blame for this, as is the norm, but the roles of greed and selfishness, festering within certain corners of society during this time of crisis, cannot be understated either. The Platform, funnily enough, is a film about such things.

The thesis of the story is simple yet brilliant: there are two inmates, in this vertical prison, per floor, and a rectangular hole cutting through each floor from the tippy-top to the very bottom. Every month your floor changes, but while there your position is absolute: those below you are below you and you are below those above, and an unspoken rule prohibits inter-floor interaction. This placement, however, is more important than just an arbitrary class-system – it is the arbitrator of when you eat and, even more importantly, how much you eat.

Every day, as the title suggests, a platform descends from the very top of the prison to its very bottom, periodically resting at each floor. Atop this platform is a banquet fit for Henry VIII himself, piled high with every food imaginable and then just a little bit more for added comfort. Floor One – the temporary cream of the crop – gets first pickings of this feast, likely gorging themselves on everything they possibly can. Shortly thereafter, Floor Two gets Floor One’s leftovers. And soon after that, Floor Three gets theirs, with the cycle repeating until all Floors have received their turn. However, by Floor Forty-Eight – where our story begins – the food is running incredibly sparse. And by Floors One-Hundred plus, perhaps even sooner, it is nonexistent. Consequently, those floors starve. Or its inhabitants commit suicide. Or they resort to more… unappetising methods, to be coy.

However, it is important to note that the prison is not built on the principle of deliberate starvation – enough food, for sure, is provided; it’s just the man-powered distribution system that lacks finesse. But that is where the poetic genius, even if its mildly accidental, of Gaztelu-Urrutia’s dystopia really shines: the prisoners gorging themselves in his world are not too dissimilar to the cretins hoarding in ours, yet neither would vilify themselves and both would damn the other. This blatant hypocrisy is astounding in its bluntness but grace and subtlety, after all, are the last things on Gaztelu-Urrutia’s mind.

Already, pre-Pandemic, his central metaphor was a little on the nose. Now, mid-Pandemic, its frightfully obtuse, though that is by design. He isn’t just sending a quiet letter of recommendation to society; he’s sending a damn wrecking ball. And what he lacks in grace and subtlety he achieves, ten-fold, in uniqueness and audacity.

It’s not the most optimistic take on society, evidently, but it’s not completely steeped in self-loathing either. Beyond the smothering concrete walls imprisoning the story (which only heighten the claustrophobic desperation) and past the mildly self-indulgent spurts of violence that queasily punctuate its point, there is a glimmer – a shadow of a flicker of a glimmer, perhaps – of hope to be found. The vehicle for this hope is Goreng (Iván Massagué), the hero of the story and a willing participant in the prison itself.

He isn’t the most likeable chap on the block, nor is he its most cunning, but his heart, ultimately, finds itself in the right place. His arc is not one of conflicting ideologies, per-say, but one of conflicting wills: he begins and ends the story an advocate for the marginally-less-Communist side of Socialism (AKA the good bit!) but grows, from his brutal experiences, into a champion for it, practising what he preaches and actively doing good without prompt. Again, he isn’t, thanks largely to Massagué’s stilted portrayal, likeable enough to carry the story’s emotional weight – something that really brings it down – but he carries its ideology flawlessly.

The Platform is not a hopeful film in the traditional ways that The Shawshank Redemption and Casablanca are, nor is it, frankly, a good one in the sense they are either (although it is certainly entertaining). The dialogue is exposition heavy and clunky; the performances, Zorion Eguileor’s gleefully sadistic Trimagasi (Goreng’s first roomie on the aforementioned Floor Forty-Eight) aside, leave much to be desired, and the execution, overall, is lacking a much-needed finesse. But there are few films out there as timely as this is right now; worse still, there are few as eerily prophetic.