Nightmare Fuel / The Platform

The Film

"There are 3 kinds of people; the ones above, the ones below, and the ones who fall."

The simplicity of being in a two-person cell, a hole, an a slowly descending platter of food is a premise simple enough to probably nullify your appetite for the next few hours.

Spoilers are unmarked

• Imagine waking up in a cell shared with a cellmate due to your criminal charge (or a volunteer choice you took thinking that it'll be an easy process), having nothing but an object of your choice which you can bring into. Upon waking up, you discover in the middle of the room there is a bottomless hole which you can see people above and below you, and soon a levitating platform descends down to your cell, filled with food that has been scrunched, bitten, smashed etc. that you must eat before it descends down after a minute.
• It's incredibly likely that during one's stay at the Hole, they will bear witness to someone throwing themselves down the Hole. And then being eaten by starving inmates.
• Just the fact that there is no regulation on what inmates can and cannot do. They are allowed to rape, murder, and cannibalize each other with no intervention.
• Being put on one of the lower levels (around the fiftieth) is basically being sentenced to starve. At these levels, all the food is gone before the platform comes, with not even bones to eat. You're likely to have to resort to cannibalism to survive, or end up as food to someone else. And assuming that you don't die, and someone manage to get through a whole month without food...you could very well just be assigned to an equally bad level the next month.
  • Goreng assumes that there might be around 250 levels in the Hole, so around 400 people every month are left to starve. However, as he and Baharat go on their descent down to distribute food, they surpass the number. There are 333 levels in the Hole.
  • In the bottommost levels, the Hole goes underground, so there's no light coming from the windows anymore. Additionally, not every level is occupied. So being in the bottom levels means a month or more of being left somewhere dark and alone save for one (probably cannibalistic) person, starving away with only the Hole itself or your level mate as a way out.
• Goreng's first cellmate Trimagasi, especially after a month being stuck with him. When they both wake up at level 171 (keep in mind that Trimagasi stayed at level 150 prior Goreng's arrival), Trimagasi tied Goreng to the bed the first thing he did before the latter woke up, and stated his plan is to to keep him alive for a week, as killing him straight away will basically cause the "meat to spoil", nor is planning to eat him straight away just to prolong their survival. On the upside (if you can call it that), he's going to nurse him after stripping off some flesh, as he believes that both of them will survive.
• What this conversation implies:
  Goreng: How many levels are there?
  Trimagasi: I don´t know. But I know there are more than 132, cause I was there.
  Goreng: 132?
  Trimagasi: And there were more below.
  Goreng: And how many food reaches that level?
  Trimagasi: Nothing.
  Goreng: You can´t be 30 days eathing nothing.
  Trimagasi: I didn´t say I ate nothing, I said nothing arrived there, and you can stay 30 days without eating.
• As the heroes descend, they pass through several cells with frozen or incenerated corpses. Meaning that people kept the food, even knowing that it will cost them their lives, or else they went insane from hunger and no longer cared.
  • One of those corpses they pass by was just the severed torso, meaning someone most likely decided to kill themselves by letting the platform crush them during its descent. How hopeless and insane would you have to be to end your life so violently?
• Trimagasi mentions having been, at lowest, floor 132, and that no food is left by then. For someone who had been there 10 months, he is extraordinarily lucky, as he had always been in the top third or so of floors and thus gotten a chance to eat nearly every month. Fridge Horror sets in when you realize that, based on math, he's probably the luckiest prisoner there, having had only a 0.009% ((132/333)^10) chance of never seeing the nightmarish bottom levels, at least until month 11. This means that either the assignments aren't random, or that every other prisoner there had even worse stories to tell. Seeing as how every non-food floor has about a 50% survival rate, this also could mean that any prisoners who'd been less lucky wouldn't be alive to tell him.