The Administration is the same organization behind the Cube.
- They decided that their cruel experiments shouldn't stop at the Cubes, and made a more "traditional" prison, with the Platform. It's practically the same idea; humans coming together could actually feed everybody, at least the first hundred levels or so. It's human selfishness and greed that is the prisoners' undoing. The Platform is the latest in the Administration's line of social experiments, which are, while inhumane, a great study of humanity.
People can ascend the Hole if they kill.
- Miharu is constantly seen descending from the floors above Goreng. As she is rumored to kill her cellmates and is seen fighting off numerous people, the Hole "rewards" her by placing her closer to the top. Goreng and Trimagasi not killing anyone leads to them going from level 48 to level 171. When Miharu offers Goreng the opportunity to kill Trimagasi, he takes it and is elevated from 171 to level 33. Goreng and Imoguiri not harming anybody causes their sharp descent into floor 202. Imoguiri's suicide is possibly misinterpreted as a merit that allows Goreng to head to floor 6. The child is found at level 333, as it's seemingly incapable of harming others and thus is prioritized by the system the least at the very bottom. This idea fits with the allegory of the Hole compared to social inequality, as ascending the ranks means stomping on those at your level and enforcing a social Darwinist attitude.
The Child is real.
- And their favorite food upon entering the Hole was the panna cotta. That's why keeping the dish on her floor despite the platform lowering into the abyss does not cause the room to heat up or freeze- it's reached its destination. This is all of course assuming that the below theory is not true...
- Confirmed by Word of God
- Which, of course, means that if everybody just took their own dish from the platform and nothing else. Everybody would have something to eat and would survive, and nobody would need to die regardless of level. (Quite clever unstated premise of the movie, if you think about it.)
The ending is all hallucinatory.
- Goreng and possibly Baharat died much earlier, and every scene near the end is the Dying Dream of the former. There are a couple inconsistencies that imply this, such as him reading Quixote despite not carrying it with him onto the platform, and the ambiguous situation brought on by the panna cotta making it to the kitchen for the chefs to misinterpret, despite the child having eaten it.
- The director of the film confirms this is what happened; Goreng hallucinated what he thinks should have been the proper ending of the journey. However, the director also confirms (and some material also supports this) that the girl is real, just not as how she's portrayed.
Sending The Child will do nothing.
- Riding the platform to a higher level is an obvious notion to any desperate person at the lowest of levels who believes they will not survive. Plenty have probably tried it before with no change. If they aren't killed, they are probably just put right back into the facility.
- Agreed. An uneaten panna cotta would send a much more powerful message than a prisoner, no matter how young and innocent they are.
The building itself is a metaphor for the inability to connect with others.
- 'Vertically', the metaphor couldn't speak louder about class inequality and ignorance/malice if it hit you over the head with a rotten, shit-stained Panna Cotta. But horizontally? There are only a few people on each level by design. To them, there is only above, below, and the food they fail to share. The reason it's Hell is because they are extremely limited in the number of things they can do besides fight for food, which includes hunter-gathering together to make more food, or talking to others to empathize with the pain they each feel and get an understanding of what they truly need and want. Whether it's a self-imposed prison in their heads or an intentional limitation, they are unable to truly talk to others above or below them as equals, and their one confidant on the same level as them ends up becoming a potential enemy due to the constant obsession with food. It's only when Goreng and Baharat go down the floors that they begin to connect to others as equals, which still gets them killed as they frequently and violently fail to negotiate peacefully.
