Production notes

The film was produced by Basque Films alongside Mr. Miyagi Films and Plataforma la película AIE, with the participation of RTVE and ETB and support from ICAA, the Basque administration, and ICO. Shooting lasted for six weeks. Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia says the film's key message is that "humanity will have to move towards the fair distribution of wealth", exploring the importance of individual initiative in driving political change. The screenplay is adapted from a theatre script by David Desola and Pedro Rivero, to which more action and physical elements were added to make it more suitable for a film. "Extensive" rewriting was required to convert the unproduced theater script into a screenplay. The director said it was a "torturous ordeal", as the writers defended their artistic vision and did not want some of the changes to be made. The concrete prison cells were built for the production in a Red Cross facility in a port in Bilbao. The director asked for cells that looked "economical, robust, [and] impregnable", which emphasized a sense of architectural and engineering proportion. Only two tiers of concrete cells were built; the appearance of many tiers of cells extending above and below each cell (visible from the hole in the center of each cell) was added in post-production using visual effects. The director says the vertical tower of cells "represents the dehumanized coldness of the Vertical Self-Management Center". The director states that the film's lavish "food was treated as another character in the story, one that is aesthetically antagonistic to the architecture of the prison." The luxurious displays of gourmet food were presented on "Versailles worthy tableware" to depict "excessive, almost erotic, opulent desire" that is eventually "desecrated" once the near-empty platform reaches the abject, starving inmates on the lower levels. The director acknowledges the film can be difficult to watch, but he says the purpose of this approach is to generate discussion and debate by viewers about the political messages. When asked about the film's brutal violence and cannibalism, the director explained that the prison "is a reflection of our society, [so] it couldn’t hide the violence. It had to show how we rip each other apart." The film uses two actors cast against type; Iván Massagué and Antonia San Juan, both of whom are known for their comedic roles. The pair were chosen to lighten the film's weighty subject by adding "humour, irony, and surrealism". The film was shot chronologically, as the main actor Iván had to lose 12 kg (26 lbs) over the six-week shoot in order to display his character's physical deterioration.

On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 81% based on 99 reviews, with an average rating of 7.3/10. The site's critical consensus reads: "While it may feel muddled at times, The Platform is an inventive and captivating dystopian thriller." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 73 out of 100, based on 15 critics, indicating "generally favourable reviews". Norman Wilner of Now correctly predicted that the film would win the People's Choice Award, giving it a five-N rating and writing that the film "has everything: low comedy, political allegory, left-field twists, crowd-pleasing surprises, spectacular violence, sadism, altruism, and yet more spectacular violence, all wrapped up in a high-concept horror film that moves the premise of Cube into a merciless vertical structure. It’s grotesque and compelling, like grindhouse Buñuel. And it never blinks." Amy Nicholson of Variety wrote that "the film’s minimalist fury feels like the plays of Samuel Beckett. Massagué and Eguileor are up to being in a zesty Waiting for Godot. And Eguileor's nasty, delightful, occasionally tender performance feels like an audition to play a Bond villain, or perhaps the Spanish resurrection of Hannibal Lecter." The film garnered new reviews after a surge in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sam Jones in The Guardian suggested it was "the perfect parable for life in the time of the coronavirus and a visceral investigation of how a crisis can expose not only the stratification of human society but also the immutable strands of selfishness coded into our DNA."