YMMV / The Platform

• Anvilicious: This film's message is about as subtle as... someone taking a shit directly in your face.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Imoguiri's dachshund Ramses, who she alternates having meals with as the first signs of the rationing.
• Nausea Fuel:
  • The extensive shots of food being messily eaten, spit at, and even crapped at before being sent to the lower levels.
  • Goreng eating a maggot from Trimagasi's rotten corpse.
  • The remains of poor little Rameses is shown on-screen.
  • Baharut getting shat on.
  • Just about any of the violence and corpses shown on-screen are extremely detailed and gross. The scene of Goreng being overpowered by another prisoner, punched in the face and strangled, only to have said prisoner decapitated right on top him leaves him absolutely soaked in blood.
• One-Scene Wonder: Most of the prisoners shown when Goreng and Baharat descend, but most notably the man with the money, the two men in the tub and Brambang, the Cool Old Guy in the wheelchair who approves of what they're doing and gives them additional advice to try diplomacy while chiding them for stepping in some of the food.
• Special Effect Failure: The titular platform is a slab of concrete that can "magically" ascend and descend at incredible speed and hold perfectly still at every level. It also gets pretty wobbly when someone jumps on top of it. In reality, the platform was most likely built on top of a hydraulic scaffold (that was chroma keyed out) and the wobble wasn't fully compensated for.
• Squick: The prisoners pissing and shitting at each other as a sign of disrespect. Baharat has the misfortune of getting some of the latter in his face.
• Subbing Versus Dubbing: There's a bit of a Broken Base over those who prefer watching the film with the original European Spanish audio vs. those who watch it with the English dub and/or subtitles.
• Vanilla Protagonist: Naïve Newcomer bookworm Goreng is the protagonist, but Trimagasi (The Old Convict and a reluctant cannibal), Cute Mute Action Mom Miharu (who travels down the Platform looking for her daughter, Imoguri (a dying former administrator of the prison who voluntarily went there to atone), Hot-Blooded Baharat (who brought a rope into the Hole with him that he seeks to use to climb different levels while being dependent on the fickle goodwill of anyone above him), and various minor prisoners who brought in odd things like a surfboard and a bag of money all feel like they could have carried the film with a bit more novelty.

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