The Platform 2 brings the horrors of The Platform to new heights while revealing the true depths to which humans can fall. The original focused on a man named Goreng who enters a multi-level facility where a platform laden with food descends once a day. Those on the top levels get first dibs on the meals, which often means that those below get only scraps, or nothing at all. As a result, they must resort to killing and cannibalism or else be killed and cannibalized themselves.
The Platform 2
- Release Date
- October 4, 2024
- Director
- Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia
- Main Genre
- Horror
The first movie quickly amassed fame for its gore and unexpected plot, as well as the important questions it posed about the nature of man. While technically a prequel, The Platform 2 nonetheless builds upon and deepens The Platform's characterization, story, and world. At the same time, it adds some horrifying scenes and twists that go even beyond the original's.
7 Dagin Babi's Punishments
The Platform 2 introduces a new set of characters called Anointed Ones who are responsible for upholding the platform's (aka Vertical Self-Management Center's) rules. The most ruthless of these Anointed Ones is an eyeless man named Dagin Babi. His methods of enforcement and justice are more horrifying than any rule infraction. For a first offense, he cuts off a person's arm. For the second, he ties them naked to the platform so that those below will eat them alive.
An Unforgettable Execution
It was horrifying enough hearing about Dagin Babi's punishments, but seeing one carried out was a whole new level of awful. After the main character Perempuán and her unnamed second roommate, played by Natalia Tena, break one of Dagin Babi's rules, he decrees that Perempuán will lose an arm and her roommate will be sentenced to death.
Watching the roommate hopelessly try to escape as the platform descends and severs Perempuán's arm is horrifying on multiple levels: first, because of the pain on Perempuán's face; second, because we know what fate awaits her roommate; and third, because that fate is completely, viciously unfair.
6 The New System Is Worse Than the Original
The Platform 2 begins by intentionally misleading the viewer into thinking it's a sequel to The Platform. The characters follow a set of rules that are ostensibly meant to ensure everyone gets their fair share of food. Since these rules were something several characters in The Platform had attempted to enact themselves, this suggests that their attempt has finally succeeded.
This makes it all the more horrifying, and despairing, when the viewer realizes that these rules were part of the platform system before the original movie. In other words, the characters' proposed solution for the platform has already been tried, and it failed even worse than no system at all.
New Rules, Same Bloodthirst
While Dagin Babi's punishments are horrifying on a visceral level, psychologically, the rules themselves are even worse. On the surface, this is the sort of world Goreng had hoped for, and yet, the outcome is the same, if not more violent than what he experienced. Perhaps this is not due to the laws themselves but rather their lack of flexibility. As Dagin Babi says, "One does not interpret the Law. One obeys it." With a system like that, it's easy for any and everyone to become a criminal.
5 A Sinister Level of Violence and Gore
The Platform fits well at home with other gory movies, but The Platform 2 gives the original a run for its money. Decapitations frequently occur off-screen, with the heads themselves falling between the floors. Several characters are also set on fire, including Perempuán's first roommate Zamiatin, who self-immolates in guilt and fear after "stealing" a dead person's food. There are also multiple fight scenes and mutilations, as well as the aforementioned punishments and executions. Not to mention, of course, many more scenes of cannibalism — which are made all the more horrifying because the characters seem to enjoy them.
Cannibalism is Only the Start
The scariest part of The Platform was the revelation that the characters would need to eat one another. In The Platform 2, the viewer already knows that the characters will likely need to do this in order to survive. For this reason, cannibalism is no longer the scariest thing about this universe — rather, it's the fact that people seem almost eager to hurt each other. The violence in that desire, and the gore it brings about, makes The Platform 2 far more bloodthirsty than the original.
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4 Trimagasi's Backstory
Trimagasi was Goreng's first roommate on level 48. He was known for saying "obviously," carrying around a large knife, and introducing Goreng to the Vertical Self-Management Center's sadistic mechanics. In The Platform 2, viewers see him first enter the facility after Perempuán's second roommate is killed. At first, he seems fairly innocent and oblivious to what's going on around him, but quickly, a more sinister side appears.
The Best Month of His Life
This side of Trimagasi is far worse than anything viewers saw in The Platform, which is really saying something, since he tied Goreng down and threatened to eat him. Here, he seems to relish in the platform's violence, even (accidentally?) killing a woman he'd been flirting with. In fact, after participating in a rebellion, he's the one who proposes that his group eat people on the lower levels. Additionally, when Perempuán tries to leave and asks if Trimagasi wants to go with her, he stays put, declaring that it's been the best month of his life.
All of these factors not only make the character of Trimagasi more horrifying, but also add terrifying implications to his interactions with Goreng. Originally, viewers assumed Trimagasi had eaten one person out of necessity while on a low level. Here, we find out that he ate multiple people across multiple levels, which means he might have been planning to eat Goreng all along, regardless of whether it was necessary to his survival. In short, there's more to Trimagasi than initially meets the eye, and these new revelations in The Platform 2 paint an image of an even more disturbing, unsettling man. Obviously.
3 Perempuán's Backstory
In the original The Platform, Goreng tells Trimagasi that he went to the Vertical Self-Management Center in order to earn a degree and quit smoking. This always seemed like a strange explanation, and The Platform 2 suggests that it was all made up.
When Perempuán reveals her own reasons for being there, she says that she was an artist whose art installation accidentally killed her boyfriend's son, and she needed time to process what had happened. At the end of The Platform 2, Goreng and Perempuán meet on the bottom level and embrace, suggesting that he might be the very boyfriend she'd harmed.
A Tragic, Terrifying Revelation
Of course, it's possible that Goreng and Perempuán's relationship isn't romantic, but the setup is certainly meant to lead the viewer to that conclusion. This would mean that Goreng was actually mourning the death of his son during his time in the facility, which explains his insistence that they save the child at the end.
While tragic, this realization is also horrifying, as Perempuán's time in the platform caused her to turn into the type of person she feared she already was — she joined the platform in order to cope with her guilt and self-loathing, only for her new surroundings to turn her into a crueler, angrier, and intentionally hurtful person. Likely, numerous others in the facility have faced similar fates as well.
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2 The Full Scale of the Carnage
Throughout the movie, the viewer has seen multiple characters kill and be killed. However, there isn't a running body count, and it's easy to lose track of the amount of lives lost. With 333 levels and 666 participants (667, counting the child), it's possible that hundreds of people are killed every month. In fact, towards the movie's end, Perempuán sees several bound and floating dead bodies that seem to hint that this number isn't far off from the mark.
Thousands Dead Each Year
Earlier in the movie, Dagin Babi was willing to starve hundreds of people in order to kill Perempuán's group of "Barbarians." Additionally, several times, the characters celebrated food reaching the lower levels, but it never made its way to the 200 and 300 floors. It's almost inevitable that at least one person died on each of these lower floors every month, either due to starvation or their roommates killing them for sustenance. Thus, while many of the deaths take place off screen, this horrifying prequel has a surprisingly high body count.
1 The Real Message
At the end of The Platform, Goreng finds a girl at the bottom of the Vertical Self-Management Center. He decides to send her to the surface to serve as a message to those who created the facility. The meaning of this message is somewhat vague, but his goal seems to be to show the creators that "goodness" or "innocence" can survive the platform and that the inmates can cast aside hunger and fear in order to protect someone. Later, Perempuán also finds a child and sends him up, seemingly for similar reasons. However, several scenes in The Platform 2 suggest that the children's ascendance is actually a message from the platform itself.
The Death of Innocence
Multiple times throughout The Platform 2, the scene shifts to several children playing on a slide. Each time, the playing is a little more aggressive and less orderly, until, finally, the children physically attack each other. One child emerges on top of a mountain of flailing limbs, at which point two adults enter the room and take him away. He is later found on the bottom floor of the Vertical Self-Management Center before being "rescued" by Perempuán.
Soon after this scene, the viewer watches multiple other adults and multiple other children ride the platform, implying that these children were also all sent up in order to stop the violence. However, the fact that so many were sent up, yet the violence continued, shows that this gesture is not actually an act of rebellion, but rather, the point of the platform.
Instead of symbolizing a path to redemption, the children are part of the cycle of violence, and sending them up merely continues that cycle. In this way, The Platform 2's message about society is not one of hope, but futility: people will continue to enter the platform, become corrupted, die, send up children, hope for change, and simply continue the cycle, indefinitely, as the evils of fear and desperation eat away at them.
The Platform 2
is available to stream on Netflix.
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