The Platform 2 Ending Explained: What Happened to Perempuán and How His Story Connects to the First Movie?
The Platform 2 Ending Explained: Following in the footsteps of the successful first installment, The Platform 2 has once again reached a loyal legion of viewers on its arrival on Netflix. Its parable about the distribution of wealth, class struggle, and spontaneous solidarity, in the style of a science fiction film, has caused the film starring Milena Smit and Hovik Keuchkerian to open numerous debates, especially with its open ending. Its director, Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia, now explains to the ending that has left plots open to the public’s interpretation. The last few minutes show us how Perempúan (Smit) eats a piece of the dog’s painting to fake his death in front of the organization and takes advantage of the situation to escape.
“The great technical challenge of this film was the weightlessness of shooting the final sequence. It took four days and 15 specialists. It was very hard, as technically all the departments had to be very aligned, having so many people hanging around to shoot it. To this we also added the difficulty of the choreographed battles, taking into account the reduced shooting space in which the actors and technical team were,” confesses Gaztelu-Urrutia. It is worth mentioning that Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia directs the film which spans 100 minutes, during which time we return to the universe of The Platform. There, as a mysterious leader takes over the platform, a new inmate finds herself drawn into the battle against this controversial method of combating the brutal food system. However, when eating from the wrong plate becomes a death sentence, there is no predicting what each person is willing to do to save their life.
The Platform 2: Plot Summary
In a sort of prison that develops vertically on a large number of levels, on floor 0, located at the top of the building, there is a fully equipped kitchen whose staff has the task of setting a large table, the “platform”, every day, with the favorite dishes of all the people imprisoned on the floors below. Each floor is numbered and two companions are moved from one level to another together every month, if both survived, randomly. The room has a sink to wash with, towels to clean yourself, and a toilet. The platform descends vertically through “the pit”, a rectangular opening in the center of each floor. Having no food with them, the prisoners have the opportunity to eat, within a few minutes, the leftovers of those on the floors above.
In this second chapter, a newcomer who wants to gain leadership by rebelling against the system is a mysterious but charismatic personality who decides to fight against a ruthless method of eating. Fear and hunger always reign supreme, but eating from the wrong plate is a death sentence, and not everyone is willing to risk their life; this time too, the (class) struggle for survival will be cruel and completely brutal. As with the premises of the 2019 Spanish gem, The Platform 2 also features the claustrophobic sets that made the cult movie directed by Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia successful and established its distinctive trait. Only on the second attempt, something seems to have gone wrong.
We are still in the “pit” but the characters change. The protagonist is a girl who has to deal with a huge sense of guilt for a dramatic event that changed her life. Once she enters the game, she will find herself face-to-face with a survival system dominated by many rules imposed by a mysterious leader. After a series of injustices, an internal struggle will begin to fight the brutal food system. The story of The Platform returns to Netflix with a renewed and doubled dose of violence and brutality. Elements that are certainly disturbing but necessary to push the viewer to a deep reflection on the concepts of right and wrong, on the sense of guilt, on what makes us good or bad, and how these labels can be interchangeable depending on the perspective from which you look at the facts.
The Platform 2 Ending Explained: This is How The Platform Works?
The Platform was one of the most-watched films in 2019. The feature film portrayed a particular penitentiary system in which the solidarity between inmates or, more specifically, that of humanity was put to the test. Thus, a platform descended with enough food for the 333 floors of the vertical structure. So that if each level ate enough and respected the food of the next level, no one would go hungry. However, if this system was violated, those on the lower floors could go a month without food. Every month, the distribution of resources in the structure changes. One day you might be on a very high floor and therefore food is plentiful, and another day you appear on a very low level, where you receive crumbs.
In the second film, there is a strict order. So if someone abuses and takes what is not theirs, they are physically punished. They might also lose a body part or die if they violate the rules that everyone knows. In this second part, the main characters are Perempuan (Milena Smit) and Zamyatin (Hovik Keuchkerian). At the beginning, we see them on the 24th floor. There, they learn the rules that were established by a man who calls himself The Master. When the inmates violate the system, the master’s disciples, called the anointed, use violence.
Why Does Zamyatin Sacrifice Himself?
When the protagonists are in room 180, it is explained that an anointed one is killing the barbarians who eat what is not theirs. This vigilante has asked the “loyal” (those who watch over each floor to make sure everything is done) to be on the lookout for “a crippled man and a cross-eyed woman” who “gorged themselves” in room 176; also, for a giant man who attacked his cellmate in room 98 and “a fat man” in room 24 who ate a dead man’s food. Perempuán knows that it is his roommate, but he lies to protect him. Zamyatin is also very ill. This, coupled with the lack of food in his new place, leads to an unstable mental state. He then decides to set himself on fire with the lighter he had in his cell. There is a lot of remorse in this action because Zamyatin is the “fat man” who had eaten the forbidden food.
Why Does Perempuán Start a Conflict?
Perempuán changes his passive attitude when he sees his first cellmate commit suicide and then his second cellmate murdered by the anointed leader, Dagin Babi (Óscar Jaenada). Before killing Perempuán’s new cellmate, Dagin Babi tells him: “You don’t interpret the law, you obey it. The exception of the righteous is the excuse of the disloyal. Those who act as such will end up interpreting the law according to their instincts. Only fear will dominate the beasts. Terror is the message”. As a consequence, he cuts off her arm strips the second woman, and ties her to the platform to send her to the cannibals. A month later, Perempuán wakes up with a new cellmate: Trimagasi (Zorion Eguileor), a character who accompanied the protagonist of the first film, Goreng (Ivan Massagué). How is this possible? We will explain it later.
The point is that both descend into the well to recruit the “barbarians” and confront the loyalists. However, Perempuán is really looking for a painting, which we assume due to the toxicity of its content will help him simulate death. When he finds it, he stays on that level. To understand it better: Perempuán understands that the system that governs The Platform at that time did not really promote justice but rather generated more conflicts and that these were resolved insanely. So she puts into action the plan that her partner had proposed to her before dying: “At the end of each month, to restore the well, the gas they use is a form of sevoflurane. That is when we will do it,” she told him, revealing that there was an element somewhere in the well that could help them look like dead and neutralize that gas. Well, that element is the painting The Drowning Dog, by Francisco Goya. By eating it, Perempuán has the opportunity to fool those who collect the bodies of the dead. When the workers of the well are evacuating the corpses of the battle between barbarians, anointed and loyalists, she wakes up. But her plan changes when she sees a guard leave a child in one of the beds on the 333rd floor. We will return to this last point later.
How Are the First and Second Movies Connected?
You probably gasped when you saw Trimagasi, “duh.” In the first film, he’s introduced as Goreng’s seasoned cellmate, but in the second film, he’s a newly arrived inmate. This is when we get the explanation to understand what’s going on: this isn’t a sequel, it’s a prequel. In this version, Trimagasi is a novice, an enthusiast of cannibalism and chaos. That is why he says that what happened in The Platform is the most exciting thing that has ever happened to him in his life. However, he is not the only character from the first film that we see in the second part.
Goreng also appears and is the one who recognizes Perempuán at the bottom of the well. How is it possible that they know each other? We should go back to the story she tells when she is registering at this place. She talks about a boyfriend she lost due to a terrible accident. “One of my pieces was a ferocious dog. Vicious. Terrible. Its claws were sharp blades, turned towards the viewer. I was told it was dangerous. But for me, it was the risk, the audacity, that made it really special. I refused to have safety barriers put on it. The boy wouldn’t stop running. Then he tripped. One of the claws, one of the blades, stuck in his eye. And he died instantly,” she confesses.
Goreng is most likely that boyfriend. In the first film, he says he enlisted voluntarily because he “wanted to quit smoking and read Don Quixote. ”He agreed to do so “for six months in exchange for an accredited degree”, but all indications are that there was some kind of grief he was healing. Finally, we have Miharu (Alexandra Masangkay), who is part of the Pit system, yet in the first she searches for her “daughter” in the Pit and befriends Goreng, though she is killed by an inmate.
Who Are the Children? Do They Exist?
In The Platform 2 we see a large number of children playing in a kind of pyramid, which has a slide. At first, it seems like an innocent and fun activity, but over time, the competition to reach the top of the structure becomes more violent. What does this mean? Like many things in both films, it all depends on interpretation. The images function as a metaphor for what happens in adult life in this structure. It doesn’t matter if order works at times, sooner or later chaos will take over the situation. However, there is one important detail: some adults appear not to put order among the children, but to take one of the children and take him to the lowest part of The Platform, the 333rd floor.
That child is the one Perempuán sees and so changes his plan, which seems to condemn her to death. However, in the first film, there was also a girl on the 333rd floor, who was supposedly the daughter of the prisoners. Does this mean that these children are children of the inmates? There is no way to confirm this. One explanation for all this could be that those who came up with The Platform system used children as a way of studying the reaction of the prisoners to the presence of innocent beings in such a depressing and hopeless center. It is a very cruel way of forcing prisoners to atone for their sins. Another is that they use them so that no one escapes.
Did Perempuán Die?
The situation in Perempuán raises many questions. The first is why the gas doesn’t affect her after she wakes up. As we can see, she’s not wearing a mask. The only answer is that the paint she ingested had some kind of effect. Another option is that nothing at this point is real, and it’s a hallucination or daydream of the protagonist. The other question is how does gravity activate on this platform? Is the prison in space? There are no answers to that. In any case, Perempuán realizes that the corpses do not go to the top, as the murdered companion had told him. On the contrary, they go much further down to level 333. He then hides and sees a child being placed on a bed. There, probably because of the accident he told about at the art exhibition, he decides to save him in search of redemption. Despite this, he hits his head on the way up and faints. He seems to have lost a lot of blood. When he wakes up, he goes down the platform with the child to the bottom of the well. The cannibals who live down there approach him and tell him that he must stay there with them, but that the child will be allowed to go back up. “Only they can come back,” they say.
After the film ends, we see added scenes, in one of which other prisoners go with children to the well. This does not have a clear explanation. It is important here to remember Goreng’s hallucination during the first film when he sees Trimagasi, who is already dead. The latter explains to the protagonist that his journey has ended because he “is not the message”, but the girl who climbs onto the platform. And in this second film, we see in the last scene that Perempuán approaches Goreng and they hug each other. This seems to indicate that they know each other and at the same time, that they are dead. We will have to wait for a third installment to find out.
