Anna Daniels
Everyone interred in the prison is there for a particular reason, and Goreng has agreed to endure six months inside with the promise that when he’s done, he’ll receive a diploma which will qualify him to become a professor. He is both an academic and an idealist, and when he learns about the conditions of the prison, he is horrified to learn that instead of each level carefully rationing out the food, the prisoners gorge themselves without regard for the people below.
His first cellmate is a man named Trimagasi (Zorion Eguileor), who has been in the prison for longer than Goreng and is both greedy and full of contempt for those in the cells below him. Goreng chastises him and attempts to get him to change his ways, but his pleas fall on deaf ears. As Trimagasi has been in the prison for a long time, he has experienced the kind of true desperation that Goreng has not. While Goreng’s intentions are clearly noble, he lacks the lived experience to communicate with someone like Trimagasi. In this way, the character serves as an allegory for the follies of idealism.
Later in the movie, Goreng teams up with another inmate to ride down with the platform and attempt to enforce a rationing system through violence. As the film’s director, Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia, told Digital Spy, this was a critique of socialism. “There may be a criticism of capitalism from the beginning,” he explained, “but we do show that as soon as Goreng and Baharat try out socialism to convince the other prisoners to willingly share their food, they end up killing half of the people they set out to help.”
Written by: Looper
