Last year, Bong Joon-ho dug into the haves and have-nots and spun a story about how each social status sees the other in the appropriately titled Parasite. A subtly wicked examination of the ways both classes tore at each other, I found myself thinking about it while I watched another foreign import called The Platform. If Parasite were a surgical utensil, minutely carving and cutting its topic, Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s dystopian nightmare The Platform crashes in with a chainsaw. It’s savage, bleak and as endlessly nihilistic as the seemingly endless pit at the center of the narrative.

Our first introduction to The Hole is with a group of immaculately dressed chefs, alternately patting at chunks of hanging meat and flesh and preparing a lush, five star feast. Lobsters, crabs, caviar, giant, three-tiered cakes and stunning panna cotta (can’t forget that dessert) are all plated to perfection on a slab while a voice over tells us that there’s three types of people: “Those at the top. Those at the bottom. And those who fall.”

We immediately meet Goreng (Ivan Massagué) as he wakes up from a stupor to find himself lying on an uncomfortable concrete bed, in a concrete cell. The only openings are in the middle of the room, where he can see rooms below and above his, endlessly repeating. The number 48 is etched on the wall and Trimagasi (Zorion Eguileor), an older man across the room, says that’s lucky. Soon, a platform lowers into the room with the ravished leftovers of the food we saw luxuriously prepared just a bit ago.

Trimagasi immediately falls upon it, drinking the leftover wine and smacking at the already chewed and picked over food. Goreng does the math and realizes that Trimagasi’s eating 98 people’s leftovers. “That’s disgusting,” he says and refuses to eat. Then the platform lowers to the next room as Trimagasi drinks the last of the wine, throws the bottle down into the next room and spits.

Goreng quickly realizes that they aren’t supposed to chat with the people below them. Why? “Because they’re below.” And when Goreng suggests that the people above them might have also spit in the food, Trimagasi nonchalantly shrugs: “They probably did. Bastards.” It’s just the way things are in The Hole. Everyone’s angry at those above them, while looking down on the people below them. Except that in a month, they’ll be put to sleep and when they wake up, they’ll be on a different, random level: “Those at the top. Those at the bottom. And those who fall.”

And fall they do. Because, as Trimagasi tells Goreng, “on upper levels, you can eat anything you like...but you’ve nothing to look forward to. And a lot to think about.” As if to punctuate his statement, a body plummets, hitting its head on the side of their floor and splattering Goreng before continuing its journey.

If you can’t tell, The Platform is bleak.

But it’s even more bleak when you realize that, as everyone gorges on the food, there’ll be a floor or a hundred that don’t get any food. And you realize that maybe that body that fell will become someone’s food. Someone who’s just hungry enough…

We follow Goreng as he’s introduced to different characters who all approach their situation differently. Trimagasi, for instance, represents those who shit on the people lower than then because the people above shit and, well, that shit roll downhill. When it’s suggested that if people ate responsibly, there might be food for everyone. But rational and pessimistic Trimagasi has been to the lower levels. He’s known months where he barely survived.

Later, we meet his polar opposite in Imoguiri (Antonia San Juan) who carefully rations her food and tries to reason with the people below her and above her to do the same. She’s filled with an idealism and selflessness in the face of starvation and death. There’s also Miharu (Alexandra Masangkay), who rides down the platform every month, looking for her young child. It’s rumored she kills her cellmate every month in hopes that she will eventually be placed with her kid. Until then, she rides the platform.

Like a Black Mirror episode, the narrative by David Desola and Pedro Rivero probably doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. The food The Administration that runs The Hole have immaculately prepared--a chef is browbeaten for a single piece of hair he gets on the food--can’t be cheap. And the prisoners, some there for crimes, others on their own volition, obviously don’t work or make them money. So how does the whole foundation work? To what end? Outside of being a strong metaphor for the way humanity treats those at different social castes, it doesn’t really make sense.

But as that metaphor, it’s a fascinating study that does not pull its punches. Cannibalism, sexual assault, murder, suicide...it runs the gamut of attrocities humankind can inflict on each other. It might be inelegant when compared to the more subtle and nuanced take on social struggles that Bong Joon-ho’s masterpiece utilizes. But it’s an uncaring world. One where people only think about themselves and look down at the people below them with disdain and the people above them with anger.

In a world where people are so short-sided and selfish they say things like, “I’m on level 7 and I’m entitled to stuff my face,” a plate of panna cotta that once contained a strand of hair can become a message. Because the world is meanginless. And if that world is meaningless, then does a message even matter? Can one person even make a difference?

Yeah. The Platform is bleak. Forget the chainsaw. It hits like a hammer.