Critics reviews

It is a disgusting, cruel film that seems written by a smart eighth-grader.

An ingenious and economical high-concept piece that uses its simple premise to generate some pithy, and fairly disquieting, sociopolitical resonances.

As political allegories go, “The Platform” ranks somewhere between “Animal Farm” and a late-period “South Park” episode on the subtlety scale. Yet timing and circumstances have rendered its directness, the outright obviousness of its metaphors and messaging, into its greatest strength.

A pitch in search of a movie to ground it, Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s The Platform never amounts to more than the sum of its parts, but fans of high-concept science fiction such as Cube and Snowpiercer may nevertheless appreciate the sheer number of those parts in a film that teems with ideas, but ultimately fails to commit to them.