My wife and I have a bit of an emergency. See, we didn’t go out and buy 4 gagillion rolls of toilet paper back when they were still on the shelves. We had enough, so we didn’t bother buying more on top of what we already had. Yet four weeks later, there are still never any toilet paper rolls for sale when we go to the store, and our inventory is starting to run dangerously low. So what does this have to do with The Platform?

Well, the movie The Platform, titled “El Hoyo” in its original Spanish, is, on its surface, a simple movie about a jail that’s run in a novel way. The jail is organized vertically, with hundreds of floors and two people confined to each floor. In the centre of each floor is a large hole, through while a vertical platform loaded with food passes each day. It stops for a brief period at each floor, lowering progressively through all the floors in the jail until it reaches the bottom.

Now, if you’re connecting dots, you’re going to start to see where I was going with the toilet paper story. Spoilers are going to be sprinkled in from here on out, though this really isn’t the kind of movie you watch for plot twists; it’s allegorical in nature. The story is told from the perspective of the protagonist, who threw himself into the jail voluntarily, to “quit smoking and read a book.” He didn’t quite know what he was signing up for, however, and he also didn’t know that, every month, all prisoners are reassigned from one floor to a different floor, chosen completely at random.

So what do you think happened to the food on the platform by the time it got past the first few floors?

…yeah.

Though there were hundreds of floors in the prison, the food never, ever made it all the way down. By the first 100 floors, it was completely picked over, leaving those unlucky enough to be stuck further down to fend for themselves. The implications of that are pretty gory, and the movie doesn’t shy away from anything.

The movie follows the protagonist as he attempts to change the system (I won’t say how) and convince the inmates to eat only what they need each day; that way, everyone will have something to eat off the platform. Inevitably though, everyone is intent on looking out for their own self-interests, with absolutely zero concern for the wellbeing of the other inmates.

I’m not usually one to go for allegories, but this was one was pretty good once I unpacked it a bit. There were a few standout metaphors in there, besides the obvious message that our own selfish greed comes at the expense of others. For one, the fact that the inmates change floors at random each month was a nice touch. It mimics the way that sometimes, in real life, those who find themselves sitting pretty on top of the world can lose it all in a flash of bad luck, and wind up part of the same company whom they turned their nose up at before.

What was more interesting, though, was the way that inmates behaved after surviving a lower floor and making it to a higher floor. Rather than show compassion for others who had taken their place at the bottom, they took even more while they were at the top, because “they didn’t know when they’d be there again.”

The Platform highlights an important challenge that humanity needs to solve if we’re going to move successfully into the future, and in my opinion is well worth the watch, if you can stomach a bit of nudity and a ton of gore (bonus points to the director for finding a way to incorporate a katana into the movie).

As for how we’re making out in terms of progress against the movie’s primary message… well, I guess I’ll let you know just as soon as I find toilet paper on the shelves once more.