When I finished The Platform 2, I was a) entertained and impressed, and b) extremely confused. I realized I would need to go back and re-watch the original film to even have a chance to unpack the film.
Well anyway, now I’ve done it, I’m happy to report that I’m just as confused as I was originally. But I’ll try to break everything anyway.
From a synopsis of the final scenes to some theories about those kids playing on that slide, here’s an (attempt to) explain the ending of The Platform 2.
SEE ALSO: The best sci-fi movies on Netflix to escape reality What’s the story of The Platform 2?
The Platform 2 is set in the same world as the first film, and mostly takes place in the same terrifying vertical prison. The basic concept is also the same: every day, a platform full of food descends cell by cell from top to bottom. Technically there is enough food for each level, but only if people stick to eating the one piece of food they ordered before entering the prison. The problem is they don’t.
Unlike The Platform’s dog-eat-dog free-for-all, the second film presents a different era in prison. The cellmates have come up with a strict system to ensure that as many people as possible eat: you only eat your food, and nothing else. Anyone who violates the “law” is punished.
What happens at the end of Platform 2?
The more time Perempuan (Melina Smit) spends in prison, the more she realizes how brutal this “law” is. First she participates in it, then she works to implement it, and then – when she falls victim to arbitrary punishment at the hands of dictatorial leader Dagin Babi (Oscar Jinada) – she begins to denounce it.
Dagin Babi enforces the “law” at any cost. Credit: Nicholas Dasas/Netflix
Instead of staying in the system, Perempuan decides to use the escape plan of her dead cellmate (Natalia Tena), who tells her that the people running the prison use a different type of sevoflurane gas once a month when rearranging the cells. “When we smell gas, that’s the moment,” she said. “If all goes well, they’ll think we’re dead. But we’ll wake up. We’ll let them take us out from above, with the bodies, and then… we’ll have to improvise.”
After killing Papi and his supporters, Perembwan swallows a piece of a substance that appears to act as a kind of breathing filter – it suffocates her consciousness, but she awakens again during this transformation at the end of the month, while the prison is suspended in a state of opposition. Gravity and crowding of guards. Bound by a mass of corpses being carried to the bottom of the pit, Perembuwan sees a child who has been placed in the lower cell, No. 333. She decides to risk her life to save him.
How does Platform 2 connect to the original?
One of the first big twists in The Platform 2 comes with the arrival of a familiar face: Trimagasi (Zorion Eguileor), who appears in the original film as the first cell mate of main character Goreng (Ivan Massagué). In the “Platform”, Tremagasi has already been imprisoned there for nine months. At one point, he tells Goreng that he started at level 72, which is where we find him and Perempuan when she wakes up after her former cellmate was killed by Papi.
Direct effects? The Platform 2 is not a sequel, but a prequel. Based on the timeline Trimagasi gave Göring in the first film, this means that the events of the second film begin about a year before the events of the original film.
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Connecting to the platform doesn’t stop there either. At the end of The Platform 2, as the end credits roll, we see a shot from the first film: Goreng and Trimagasi talking to each other in the endless darkness below the lowest level of the platform. In the final moments of The Platform 2, Goreng turns around when he hears Perembuan’s voice.
“You,” she says. “what are you doing here?”
The two embrace with tears in her eyes. They clearly know each other outside of prison. Perhaps the implication is that Goreng was the partner mentioned by Perempuan in the story of her life before the pit.
Will Perembwane survive?
It’s never been made clear, but it seems almost certain that Perempuan died at the end of Platform 2. While trying to rescue the child, she constantly hit her head on the side of the concrete prison as she tried to float up, resulting in a huge loss. Of blood on the road.
In the film’s final scene, she descends with the child into the black depths below the pit, where other dead figures wait to greet her.
An attempt to escape from Perembuan does not go as planned. Credit: Nicholas Dasas/Netflix
“Only they can climb,” a woman told her, referring to the child. “Your journey is over, but he will have another chance.”
Given that Perempuan’s other dead cellmate Zamyatin (Hovik Keushkirian) is also there, it seems that the black void beneath the prison is a metaphor for death. In real life, we can assume that Perempuan died while floating up through the prison. But her mission to save the child and atone for past sins was successful.
What’s the deal with kids playing on the slide?
Scattered throughout “Platform 2” are sequences in which children play on what looks like a stone pyramid with steps and a slide. At first the play is structured and orderly, then descends into tears as the children struggle for control. Finally they fight and scratch each other to try to get to the top of the pyramid. The child who reaches the highest point is the one who is taken by two adults, and later placed in cell No. 333 by the people who work in the prison. This is the little boy who was saved by Perembuan.
In the original film, Goering also finds a child at the bottom of the prison. Like Perembuan, he saved the child’s life, later referring to her as a “message.”
So what exactly is the deal with these children? Why are they placed at the lowest level of the pit? Is it real or just a hallucination?
Obviously this part is up to interpretation, but if we had to guess we would say that the children on the pyramid are a metaphor for prison, which in turn serves as a metaphor for society. The prison in The Platform 2 starts out as a structure before descending into chaos; So do the children playing on the slide. In the end, although they all struggle to climb the pyramid, there is no real reward waiting for them – in fact, for the child who reaches the top, the opposite is true. Like the prison system itself, the message here seems clear enough: societal power structures are both inevitable and incredibly destructive.
This is all very well, but do these children really exist? Have they actually been put in prison, or are they part of the other characters’ dying hallucinations? At the end of the first film, it’s hard to say. By the time Goring finds the little girl, he is so hurt, she probably only really exists in his mind. However, Platform 2 seems to indicate – mainly through what Perembuan sees when she regains consciousness during the prison change – that the children are indeed being taken and placed on Level 333. But why? What is the purpose of putting them there in prison, especially at a level where they have hardly any chance of survival?
Perhaps, in the twisted logic of the pit itself, the children are there to offer some form of potential salvation to the prisoners. It seems implied in The Platform 2 that adults who enter the hole rarely, if ever, leave it. But perhaps by offering them an innocent life to save, the Pit provides them with an escape from their inner prisons by giving them something to die for?
Platform 2 is now streaming on Netflix.
