When I finished The platform 2I was a) entertained and moved and b) deeply confused. I realized I had to watch the original again to even have a chance of unpacking the film.

Well, anyway, I’ve done that now, and I’m happy to report that I’m almost as confused as I was originally. But I’ll still try to break it all down.

From a recap of the final scenes to some theories about the kids playing on this slide, here’s an (attempted) explanation of the ending The platform 2.

what is The platform 2 around?

The platform 2 takes place in the same universe as the first film and largely takes place in the same nightmarish vertical prison. The basic concept is the same: every day, a platform filled with food descends from top to bottom, cell by cell. Technically there is enough food for each level, but only if people stick to eating the one food they requested before entering the prison. The problem is that they don’t.

In contrast to the dog-eat-dog-free-for-all-in The platformHowever, the second film introduces a different era in the prison. Cellmates have devised a strict system to ensure that as many people as possible eat: they only eat their own food and nothing else. Anyone who breaks “the law” will be punished.

What happens in the end? The platform 2?

The more time Perempuán (Milena Smit) spends in prison, the more she learns how brutal this “law” is. First she takes part, then advocates for enforcement, and then – when she falls victim to arbitrary punishment by the dictator Dagin Babi (Óscar Jaenada) – begins to rail against it.

Dagin Babi enforces “the law” at all costs.
Photo credit: NICOLAS DASSAS/NETFLIX

Instead of staying in the system, Perempuán decides to use the escape plan of her dead cellmate (Natalia Tena), who told her that the prison’s leaders use a variant of sevoflurane gas once a month when rearranging the cells. “When we smell the gas, that’s the moment,” she said. “If everything goes well, they will think we are dead. But we will wake up. We’ll let ourselves be taken out with the bodies from above, and then… we’ll have to improvise.” “

After killing Babi and his supporters, Perempuán swallows a piece of material that appears to act as some kind of breathing filter – it suffocates her unconscious, but she wakes up again during this transition at the end of the month, while the prison is suspended for anti-criminal offenses. Gravity and a swarm of guards. Tied up in a mass of corpses brought to the bottom of the pit, Perempuán sees a child housed in the lowest cell, number 333. She decides to risk her own life to save it.

How works The platform 2 connect with the original?

One of the first big twists The platform 2 comes with the arrival of a familiar face: Trimagasi (Zorion Eguileor), who appears in the original film as the first cellmate of the main character Goreng (Ivan Massagué). In The platform Trimagasi has been detained there for nine months. At some point he tells Goreng that he started on Level 72, where we find him and Perempuán as she wakes up after her previous cellmate was killed by Babi.

The immediate implication? The platform 2 is not a sequel, but a Prequel. Based on the timeline that Trimagasi Goreng gives in the first film, this means that the events in the second film begin about a year before those of the original.

The connection to The platform It doesn’t stop there either. At the very end The platform 2As the credits roll, we see a shot from the first film: Goreng and Trimagasi talking to each other in the endless darkness beneath the lowest level of the platform. In the last moments of The platform 2Goreng turns around when he hears Perempuán’s voice.

“You,” she says. “What are you doing here?”

The two hug and she has tears in her eyes. It’s clear they knew each other outside of prison. The implication is perhaps that Goreng was the partner mentioned by Perempuán in her story of life before the pit.

Will Perempuán survive?

It’s not explicitly stated, but it seems almost certain that Perempuán is dead in the end The platform 2. In her attempt to save the child, she continually hits her head against the wall of the concrete prison as she tries to float upwards, losing a lot of blood.

In the film’s final sequence, she descends with the child into the black depths beneath the pit, where other dead characters wait to greet her.

Perempuán’s escape attempt does not go as planned.
Photo credit: NICOLAS DASSAS/NETFLIX

“Only they can go up,” a woman tells her, referring to the child. “Your journey is over, but he will have another chance.”

Given that Perempuán’s other dead cellmate Zamiatin (Hovik Keuchkerian) is also down there, the black void beneath the prison seems to be a metaphor for death. In real life, we can assume that Perempuán died while floating up through the prison. But her mission to save the child and atone for past sins was successful.

What’s wrong with the kids playing on the slide?

Spotted throughout The platform 2 are sequences in which children play on a kind of stone pyramid with steps and a slide. At first the play is structured and organized, then it erupts into tears as the children struggle to maintain control. Eventually they fight and attack each other to reach the top of the pyramid. The child who reaches the highest point is taken away by two adults and later taken to cell 333 by prison staff. This is the little boy that Perempuán saves.

In the original film, Goreng also finds a child at the bottom of the prison. Like Perempuán, he saves the child’s life and later refers to him as an “embassy”.

So what exactly is going on with these kids? Why are they placed in the lowest level of the pit? And are they even real or just a hallucination?

Obviously this part is left up to interpretation, but if we had to guess, we would say that the children on the pyramid act as a metaphor for the prison, which in turn acts as a metaphor for society. The prison in The platform 2 begins with a semblance of structure before descending into chaos; This also applies to the children playing on the slide. And although they try hard to climb the pyramid, in the end there is no real reward awaiting them – in fact, the opposite is true for the child who reaches the top. As with the prison system itself, the message here seems clear enough: social power structures are unavoidable and also incredibly harmful.

That’s all well and good, but do these children actually exist? Are they really going to prison or are they part of the other characters’ dying hallucinations? At the end of the first film, it’s harder to say for sure. When Goreng finds the little girl, he is seriously injured and it is possible that she only exists in his mind. The platform 2However, seems to indicate – especially through what Perempuán sees when she regains consciousness during the prison exchange – that they are in fact children Are taken and placed in level 333. But why? What purpose does prison serve to house them there, especially at a level where they have little chance of survival?

Perhaps, according to the twisted logic of the pit itself, the children are there to offer the prisoners some form of possible redemption. It seems to be implied The platform 2 that adults who go into the pit rarely, if ever, actually go. But perhaps, by giving them an innocent life to save, the Pit offers them a way out of their own inner prisons by giving them something to die for?

The platform 2 is now streaming on Netflix.