The Platform (2019)

Sarah Callen
Movies & Us
Published in
4 min readApr 25, 2020

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Putting a morbid spin on the haves vs. have-nots.

The Platform movie poster

One of the things that fascinates me about the coronavirus phenomenon is that we’re all going through the same thing at the same time. We’re not distracted by our own little regional phenomena; the entire globe has a singular focus during this moment in history. This means that every film or television show I watch, book I read, or post I type is processed through the filter of the current crisis — I keep trying to get away from it and go back to my pre-corona filter, but I just can’t.

The Platform is a film that, at first, I didn’t think was pandemic-appropriate. I was focused on all of the food that people were eating, touching, and even stepping on, before leaving for the others below them. During a time when we’re all hyper-aware of what we touch and the germs we leave behind, I cringed any time the food was shown on screen.

But the longer I watched, the more I realized that this film is probably more relevant to our current situation than even some of the overtly pandemic films. The concept of the film is simple enough: there’s a finite amount of food that is lowered on a platform daily and people feed on it until there’s nothing left. Throughout The Platform, different characters share their ideological beliefs about how this should go and each character is transformed as their fate in the hole (as it’s…

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Sarah Callen
Movies & Us

Every number has a name, every name has a story, every story is worthy of being shared.