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Grief and heartbreak easily lend themselves to stories rooted in the dreamy potential of the counterfactual. The loss of another demands you ask yourself a simple question with infinite answers: “What if?” What if I’d said this? What if I’d done that instead? Would they have stayed? Would they still be here? In Nacho Vigalondo’s ambitious if baggy and imperfect lo-fi sci-fi romance “Daniela Forever,” Henry Golding’s Nick isn’t just stuck asking himself those questions. He is actively rewriting his story with his titular girlfriend (Beatrice Grannò) in a dream world where he controls any and all possibilities.

That isn’t hyperbole. Nick, a British DJ living in Madrid who’s been mourning the loss of Daniela for weeks on end, learns of a new type of drug that may help his situation. With just one pill a night, he’s told, he’ll be...

The allegorical simplicity of Netflix’s The Platform makes it brilliant—a sequel seems antithetical. Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s The Platform 2 needlessly complicates the original’s food-fighting take on hierarchical class governance. Religious iconography influences heavy-handed zealotry, while callbacks and returning characters feel out of place. Gaztelu-Urrutia’s expansion feels redundant and over-explained,...

After the death of his girlfriend Daniela (The White Lotus’ Beatrice Grannò), Nicolas (Henry Golding of Crazy Rich Asians), the protagonist of Nacho Vigalondo’s Daniela Forever, falls into a deep depression. Grief fogs daily life — slowing time and muting once pleasurable activities. Piles of clothes and dirty dishes precariously stacked on kitchen surfaces measure his uneven motivation. The atmosphere is bleak and Nicolas, a DJ living in Madrid, feels trapped. So when the chance to find relief from his punishing memories presents itself, he is intrigued.

Premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival, Daniela Forever is an inverse Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind mixed with the sci-fi preoccupations of last year’s Fingernails. The film follows Nicolas as he embarks on a drug trial treatment meant to alleviate his depression through lucid dreaming. Instead of erasing his memories, a pill allows him to conjure a false world in which Daniela is still alive.

Debut director Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s The Platform (El Hoyo) makes no apology for its anti-capitalist stance, stark visuals and social metaphors, which in today’s coronavirus era make for very sober and self-reflective viewing. It highlights people’s greed and selfishness in desperate and restrictive circumstances and ironically revolves around food. Indeed it is highly topical, with food stockpiling from stores set against messages on social media about “being kind” and thoughtful.

Much like a cross between Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover with its lavish cooking scenes at the start that have a whiff of malaise about them with their ominous carcasses on display, the decadent and destructive nature of Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise, and the slow-burn dawning of eternal entrapment within four walls like Lenny Abrahamson’s Room and Vincenzo Natali’s Cube, The Platform is instantly designed to unsettle, before the characters have fathomed their situation.

There are three types of people, according to the opening lines of The Platform: those at the top, those at the bottom, and those who fall between them. That class-structure conceit forms the backbone of this ingenious Spanish horror that won the Midnight Madness sidebar at this year’s Toronto Film Festival, a twisted fantasy that aims high with socio-political ideas but never lets that get in the way of the gruesome nastiness of its Saw-like thrills.

Save for a handful of flashback scenes, we never escape the near-future superstructure of “el hoyo”–”the pit” in Spanish–a gargantuan underground holding center, in which each floor holds two randomly assigned people. The “platform” of the English translation is an immense platter of food, lowered into the pit that stops for a few minutes level by level, so that residents munch on as much as they can to survive the day.

Nameless cooks hustle in the opening montage of Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s brutalist nightmare “The Platform.” Their kitchen is a blend of the delicate and the savage. A violinist plays as blades rip through fish, and the head chef caresses a dangling ham. When finished, they’ve assembled a still-life masterpiece of lobster, papaya and cake on a concrete slab. The feast could feed hundreds, but it never does. As it descends, level by level, down a residential tower, each pair of cellmates have minutes to gobble as much as they can before the food moves on to the next floor. With no distractions except for that day’s meal, the citadel is a test of survival and humanity. Says an intake officer (Antonia San Juan), “We prefer to call it a vertical self-management center.”

He and writers David Desola and Pedro Rivera are curious about how the poor devour each other.