I highly recommend it, with the MAJOR caveat that it contains extreme gore and violence. If you are not comfortable watching that sort of thing, DO NOT WATCH THIS MOVIE. IT WILL UPSET YOU GREATLY.
I haven't really included any spoilers below, but if you want to go into this movie with no knowledge of what it's about, stop reading now.
----------------
With that warning in place, the setup of the movie is as follows: it's set in what is essentially a vertical prison, starting with level 1 at the top and extending downwards to an unknown number of floors below. Each level is an identical, concrete room about 20 feet by 20 feet, and about 10 feet tall, with a large rectangular hole in the center of the floor and ceiling. The entire movie is set in this location, making it quite surreal and dreamlike (or rather, nightmarish) -- you don't really learn anything about the world outside.
There are two people -- prisoners? Let's call them "residents" -- who live on each level. At the end of each month, the residents are gassed unconscious, and randomly assigned to a new level, where they wake up.
The catch is that while the residents are provided with water, their only food comes from a platform which floats down through the large rectangular hole once per day. The food on the platform begins as a sumptuous, perfect banquet provided by elite chefs on level 0. As the platform descends, it stops at each level for a few minutes, and the two residents can eat as much as they like. (However, if they take any food off the platform and attempt to store it, their level quickly becomes either too hot or too cold to endure, and they will die.)
The point is that if each resident consumed a small ration of food every day, the platform would contain enough food for everyone to survive. But you can guess what actually happens -- the people at the top eat like kings, but the lower the platform goes, the less food is available, until pretty quickly there aren't even scraps left. What happens to the people on the lower levels, I shall leave to your imagination (another warning: the movie does not leave it to your imagination).
But what's fascinating is how the people react when they're on different levels. Even though they know that they may wake up on a level where they won't get any food for 30 days -- and even AFTER they've gone through that horrible experience -- they still stuff their faces when they wake up on a higher level, because they think they "deserve" it. Not only that, but they cruelly deride the people below them -- even though they may have just been in that position, and even though they arrived on their current level through pure chance.
Ultimately the movie is about one guy who tries to see if he can break the system.
It's a truly weird, messed-up movie, but a fascinating commentary on human behavior, capitalism, and game theory. It's a metaphor for how even though we want the people "above" to share with us, we often fail to appreciate that there are many more people "below" us, with whom we don't want to share. And that most people will automatically consider their own personal well-being above the good of society, even knowing that if we all considered what's in society's best interests, we'd be able to protect ourselves from terrible outcomes. (So maybe the movie is about climate change and health care as well.)
But yeah, one final warning: there are some extreme scenes in this movie that most people will find more than a little upsetting.
= new reply since forum marked as read
