If you want to say which country in the world has the best thrillers, Spain can definitely be nominated.
And Spain is very good at creating fascinating suspense plots in a single scene, such as "Buried Alive", "The Dark Side", etc., which are typical representatives.
At the end of 2019, another Spanish high-scoring thriller was released - "Hungry Platform"
The film was nominated for the Spanish Goya Award for Best New Director and Best Original Screenplay, and won the audience of the Toronto International Film Festival Choice Award.
is very popular in China. Just a few days after its release, more than 50,000 people rated it on Douban. The number of short comments quickly reached more than 15,000, and it is still growing at a rate of several hundred discussions per minute. It broke into fifth place on Douban’s weekly word-of-mouth rankings. This is a trend that is going to be popular.
I don’t know how many people still remember the 2008 Canadian short film called “The Next Level” which won the Canal+ Television Award at the Cannes Film Festival.
The plot setting of "Hungry Platform" is similar to that of "The Next Level".
As mentioned before, the story of "Hungry Platform" also takes place in a confined space, this space is called: the prison pit.
Based on the "sci-fi thriller" genre setting of the film, we can understand this prison pit as a high-tech dark product in the future world.
It is a variant of prison, like a bottomless pit. The prison was transformed into a bottomless pit, and the claustrophobic person said he really wanted to vomit after watching it.
The prisoners are locked in these vertically arranged rooms, with an open space in the middle for the lifting platform:
The lifting platform is responsible for providing food to the prisoners, and it moves vertically downwards from here every day.
In other words, the food eaten by people on each level is leftover from the people on the previous level.
The higher the people go, the fresher they eat, while the lower the people eat, the dirtier the food, or even nothing.
Moreover, the system of the prison pit is that two people live on each floor.
So the further down the prison chain, the more the inmates will fight for food, and even kill each other and eat human flesh to satisfy their hunger.
is simply a realistic version of the eighteenth level of hell.
And the most terrifying thing is that the floors where the prisoners live are not fixed. Every once in a while, they will be randomly transferred to another floor.
has a total of 333 layers. You may be transferred to layer 1 or to layer 333.
In other words, everyone may experience days of killing each other. You may have been eating fresh food on the top floor the day before, but when you opened your eyes the next day, you came to an endless hell filled with corpses.
The first advantage of "Hungry Platform" is that its depiction of the prison pit is detailed, vivid and bold enough, allowing the audience to deeply understand the despair inside.
When the male protagonist was first imprisoned, he lived on the 48th floor. At first, he dismissed the leftovers on the elevator platform, holding a copy of "Don Quixote" and struggling to maintain his dignity.
But soon, he was overcome by hunger.
The screams from the lower level and the corpses that suddenly fell from the upper level reminded him that this is an environment where the jungle is strong and the strong eats the strong:
You are not qualified to be picky. If you don’t seize the time to chew up these residues, you will end up like the people at the bottom. Just as miserable.
There are many bloody scenes in the film, such as chewing raw meat;
There is also cutting meat from the body of a living person, which is painful to watch:
Why cut the body of a living person? Because if you kill them first and then cut them up, the corpses will rot quickly and will not be enough to sustain the food intake of the lower class for a month.
After the cutting, the victim should be bandaged to ensure that the victim lives long enough, which is the way for a living person to survive.
The prison pit is not a place to guard perverted murderers, but the devil's system makes it possible for everyone here to become a sadist.
The second advantage of "Hungry Platform" is that the film uses a lot of imagery to contrast reality, conveying a strong sense of metaphor and irony.
For example, the book "Don Quixote" that the male protagonist brought to prison:
When he lived on the upper floor, the male protagonist still had the energy to read, but when he went to the lower floor, he could only eat leftovers and lick corpses. Blood, even killing people. All the knowledge in the
book is not feasible here. The rules and ideals written by people at the top do not apply in the lower-level environment.
There is a sharp contrast between people in prison and people outside prison.
At the beginning of the video, there is a scene of people from the Bureau carefully preparing food:
Every prisoner will write down his favorite recipe before going to prison. The people in the kitchen prepare it with all their heart, not even letting go of a vegetable worm or a piece of food. root hair.
In their opinion, the empty plates that come back from the lift every day show how satisfied the inmates are with the food, and never think about the atrocities that may be happening inside.
So when a plate of panna cotta was returned unopened, they never imagined that it might be a cry for help from an inmate. Instead,
stared at a hair on the plate and reflected on the hygiene problem.
The cry for help issued by the people at the bottom with their lives, to the people at the top, is just a hair on the plate.
Maybe they will also complain: because a hair is a waste of a plate of food, the people at the bottom are too picky!
Another representative figure is a staff member of the Administration who voluntarily went to jail:
In her view, the prison pit is a vertical self-management center where people form spontaneous solidarity and ultimately form an ideal society.
But not long after she was imprisoned, she committed suicide on the day she fell to the 202nd floor.
"Hungry Platform" conveys a cruel reality: human nature makes absolute equality impossible to achieve forever, and breaking down classes and human coexistence is just a beautiful fantasy.
People in the upper class are qualified to make rules because they have enough resources.
But the rules they set are all wishful thinking, imposing ideals on cruel reality, and in the end they can only end up defeated like Don Quixote.
Civilized means cannot solve the problem of food and clothing. The cold-bloodedness of the system makes the resistance of the people at the bottom look so humble and powerless.
Of course, "Hungry Platform" is not good enough. Some people pointed out that the logic of the film is inconsistent with reality, and there are many unreasonable things in the plot.
For example, why don’t the inmates take the lift together and share food on the first floor?
The ending of the film is also rather hasty, and the open ending is confusing. Many people have put forward different conjectures and analyses.
The most recognized analysis at present is that Asian little girls do not actually exist, they are just characters imagined by the male protagonist. Many details in the
film can support this view. For example, the little girl lives on the 333rd floor without any food source, so she cannot survive.
Also, when the male protagonist went down to the 333rd floor, he did not throw the panna cotta down, but the room temperature did not change. This is not in line with the prison pit system.
And most importantly, the people from the Authority only received the panna cotta, not the people.
The ending has actually been written as early as 1/3 of the film: the administrator cannot receive the message, and the person who calls for help will never be released from prison.
However, these are differences in philosophy and a matter of opinion.
Overall, "Hungry Platform" is a typical and qualified Spanish-style thriller, with a well-created atmosphere and clear values conveyed.
looks quite enjoyable, but it is not suitable to be taken during meal times...
In the final analysis, these types of films are warning us that the greedy nature of human beings cannot be changed, it is extremely difficult to build trust, and empathy is just a romantic lie. .
These will become stumbling blocks for us to build an ideal society.
Whether technology will eventually take us off or turn the world into purgatory, the key lies in human nature.
Qingshi Film Editorial Department | Lao Wang
This article is the original content of Qingshi Film. Please do not reproduce it in any form without authorization!
