Vertical Ethics in The Platform: An Ethical Literary Criticism of Food, Power, and Structural Injustice

This article examines the Spanish dystopian film The Platform as a narrative allegory of global food inequality and structural injustice. Grounded in Nie Zhenzhao’s Ethical Literary Criticism, the analysis explores how the film constructs a moral system through its institutional design—one that removes private ownership, disconnects entitlement from labor, and subjects access to arbitrary mechanisms of control. Rather than portraying scarcity as a natural condition, the film frames hunger as a consequence of ethical failure embedded in systemic design. By juxtaposing the narrative’s spatial and institutional architecture with real-world food systems, the study clarifies how dystopian storytelling can reflect and strategically invert global structures of inequality. Through this approach, this article demonstrates the capacity of ethical literary analysis to critically engage with cinematic texts and illuminate how fictional narratives can function as frameworks for examining the moral architecture of contemporary global systems.