Squid Game Review: Netflix’s Deadly Game Series Is A Hit, For Surprising Reasons

For most of the world, money equals survival. Aside from the wealthiest few, people living in capitalist countries have to plan their lives based on their ability to earn money: how they can leverage their skills for profit, which jobs have the best earning potential, how much do they need to maintain their lifestyles and their loved ones. At some point, everyone has considered what they are willing to do for money, and the answer to that question really depends on how desperate we are. Therefore, it is not unthinkable that someone would be willing to endure physical harm and great risk for the possibility of never having to worry about money again.

Netflix’s new surprise hit Squid he plays on that idea and turns it into a shady game. It begins when someone offers a desperate man a chance to play childhood games and bet on the outcome. As the supply rises, it turns out that more than 450 desperate people have been lured into a brutal life-and-death contest, where they play popular childhood games for a chance to win 45.6 billion Korean won, around $ 39 million. The nine-episode Korean drama is one of a small handful of the many American Netflix K-dramas that have risen to massive popularity and have reached the service’s Top 10.

And no wonder, it’s impossible to get away from him, even as he quickly becomes more brutal and bloodthirsty. TO Real battle-Type of story where people are forced to kill each other for freedom and resources is nothing new. But Squid it marks its own territory, first with its especially savage premise and constant tension around life and death scenarios, and second, by focusing on each character’s decisions as they struggle to choose between survival and humanity.

Despite the initial absurdity of the stylized survival games, SquidThe cultural context, motivations, and interpersonal conflicts are surprisingly realistic. The show takes place in present-day Korea and the players are selected from the fringes of society. It seems like the whole game might be happening in secret today. Recent East Asian TV and Film Stories such as Parasite, Fire, and Itaewon class have cleverly tackled wealth inequality and class struggle in real world circumstances, rather than through the dystopian lenses of American fantasies like The Hunger Games and Elysium.

Film director Hwang Dong-hyuk (My father, The crucible) follows this trend with Squid, his first drama series: Fantastic elements notwithstanding, the show seems to have been designed to show that our current reality can be as hellish as any imagined world.

Each of the players in the series has reason to value potential prize money over their own lives. The show’s protagonist, Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), owes a fortune to loan sharks and double the bank, but wants to take care of his elderly mother and 10-year-old daughter. His childhood friend, investment banker Cho Sang-woo (Park Hae-soo), has been stealing money from his clients. Kang Sae-byeok (Jung Ho-yeon) is a North Korean defector who needs a house to get her brother out of an orphanage. The rest of the cast obviously include nice guys and antagonists, but they all have backstories compelling enough to explain why they would be drawn into the Game in the first place.

The game itself is a nightmare childhood vision, where losing in a traditional Korean children’s game (including universal games like Red Light, Green Light, or Tug of War) means a bullet to the head or a more gruesome death. Masked wizards in bright suits machine-gun the field of contestants and collect their bodies after each event, placing the eliminated, both dead and dying, in decorated coffins like gift boxes. Players enter and exit the playgrounds through a pastel maze from an MC Escher painting. SquidThe images, which juxtapose symbols of immaturity with graphic violence, add to the dissonance that drives the show. It all reads like goofy, frivolous fun that Korean adults normally only get into if they are celebrities on variety shows like Running man or Meeting Bros – at least, until the bodies start to fall.

Although a decent-sized subplot follows a detective investigating who is driving the competition, the game itself is more compelling than the mechanism behind it. Ultimately, secrets amount to nothing more than what players and viewers learn as they go through the experience. The ride is much more engaging, especially since the game masters ‘manipulation of the players, and the players’ manipulation of each other, keeps the audience guessing all the time. The public also feels the same absence of time as the players, who remain in a windowless enclosure regulated by game times and lights out, with one round a day. The haunting score of Parasite composer Jung Jae-il adds to the constant tension.

SquidIn its simplest form, it is more than nine hours of watching average people, burdened with immense debt, make increasingly desperate and murderous decisions while still trying to hold on to their humanity. Game goers point out at first that all of the players joined the game of their own free will, literally offering their lives in exchange for the chance for something better. Once the game levels up and victory involves consciously killing other people to get the most of the pot, the hope of wealth is replaced by questions of humanity. These questions are more intimate than elevated. There’s no wringing your hands on capitalism and the state of the world, just the question of whether it’s worth surviving watching a friend die.

The show’s message sounds like a self-help idiom: a person’s decisions shape their life. It’s what you do with your circumstances that counts. Squid is that the ethos marked up to one hundred. Who is behind the curtain, what social circumstances led to the founding of the Game, who knows the Game is happening, and who turns a blind eye – none of these details is the real point. The show is successful because it creates two-dimensional characters and respects every choice they make, whether it be to help or harm, maintain their humanity, or sacrifice it for profit. While the game itself is a parable, the characters are fully and empathetically human.

Looking Squid It is uncomfortable. It’s tempting to overtake, either to skip the blood or to avoid feeling dread when the show lengthens some of the lethal rounds. While the discomfort could be dismissed as the price of admission for watching a death game, it really affirms the audience’s own humanity. If viewers do not look with deep empathy for the characters, the show would be pure voyeurism, the entertainment of watching game pieces fall off each other from the board. Hwang and his team take great care of all players, explaining how they are trapped in a horrible system and simply trying to survive, at any cost. Squid It’s exciting, surprising, and tense, but that care is what really makes it worth watching.

All nine episodes of Squid are now available on Netflix.