"This is Hell. There are no rules in Hell" - 101
Imagine you had to play children's games to save your life. Imagine that if you fail in games as seemingly simple as tug of war, marbles, stepping stones, making shapes out of dalgonas (sugary snacks), red light/green light (or What's the time Mr.Wolf as we used to call it), and the titular squid game itself that you are summarily executed by being shot in the head by a man wearing a pink jumpsuit whose face is obscured by a black mask with a triangle on it?
That's the basic premise of Hwang Dong-hyuk's worldwide Netflix smash hit Squid Game and it is, of course, an utterly ludicrous premise. But it is also a fascinating one, an enthralling one, and, quite often, a very disturbing and violent one.
Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) is a middle aged man living in Seoul who has not been prudent with his finances. His wife has left him and is moving with her new partner and Gi-hun's child to the US and he's being pursued, and violently assaulted, by loan sharks. He argues with his mother (Kim Young-ok), he gambles, and he even obsesses over the 'crane game' in the arcade.
You know the one. The one where you have to hook a teddy bear or some other piece of crap using a panel of buttons on the side. It's a rubbish game but Gi-hun, a kind man, seems to lack common sense. Witnessed quite clearly when he buys his ten year old daughter a gun for her birthday. The fact it turns out to be one of those lighters that looks like a gun makes it only a marginally less inappropriate gift.
Gi-hun is desperate so when a closing doors moment in the subway leads to him being challenged to a game of ddakji for money by a nameless and slick salesman (played by Gong Yoo) he is, of course, up for it. When he's offered the chance to play an even bigger game, or series of games, for even higher prizes it's an offer he can't refuse. But when masked men arrive to pick him up and then fill the back of the car he's in with noxious gas that knocks him out it becomes clear that the stakes will be a lot higher than he'd imagined.
Gi-hun wakes up in an enormous dormitory with hundreds of identical beds piled high as if to make a huge ziggurat. Like the four hundred and fifty-five others in the dormitory, he is dressed in a dark green tracksuit and he has been assigned a number which is stitched in to the breast of his tracksuit top.
Gi-hun is 456. He soon befriends 001, Oh Il-nam (O Yeong-su) is an elderly man with a brain tumour and not much time left who, it appears, has chosen to spend his final days playing this lethal game rather than bowing out quietly. Other bedfellows are there for various different reasons though all of them, it seems, are in perilous situations financially.
101 is Jang Deok-su (Heo Sung-tae), a cartoonish snarling gangster with a mullet, a face tattoo, and no morals whatsoever. Number 067 is Kang Sae-byok (Jung Ho-yeon), a North Korean defector who's keen not to give too much away for obvious reasons. 199 is Abdul Ali (Anupam Tripathi), a Pakistani migrant worker who has not been paid by his unscrupulous employer for months.
Han Mi-nyeo (212, Kim Joo-ryoung) is a screeching woman with a very loose relationship with the truth, Ji-yeong (240, Lee Yoo-mi) is much quieter but her tranquil nature belies a troubled past, and Byeong-gi (111, Yoo Sung-joo) is a disgraced doctor whose behaviour inside the squid game is unlikely to honour the Hippocratic oath.
There is also Cho Sang-woo (218, Park Hae-soo) who was once an understudy to Gi-hun but whose career, partly due to his intellect, soon overtook that of Gi-hun. Sang-woo has since run into both debt and trouble with the police. Gi-hun treats Sang-woo as an old friend and Sang-woo does the same for G-hun. At least on the surface.
When, very soon in the first game, it become apparent that the forefeit for losing will be life itself, a brutal murder by faceless assassins, the very notions of friendship, loyalty, and trust are put to the sword. Soon the bodies pile high, as Boris Johnson likes it, and the contestants are whittled down very quickly.
Even when the players are allowed a vote on ending the game, it brings out some of the lowest, meanest, most anti-Spartacist of human behaviour. At least in many of the contestants. At its heart, Squid Game is a parable about the evils of faceless capitalism, a meditation on how money corrupts everything, and an elegy for a lost age of innocence.
It's a satire about a world where no act of kindness goes unpunished, about greed, and about the dangers of selfish individualism over collective endeavour. The fact it's such a highly unusual, downright weird, one only makes it stronger. It plays out like some avant-garde ballet on uncanny film sets with giant playgrounds and pastel shaded mazes of stairways that look like something from The Prisoner.
Not a bad comparison considering the confusing hierarchy of shapes and numbers (the squares appear to have primacy over the triangles). There is a lot of grisly food preparation, plenty of unappetising looking meals (a raw potato and a bottle of water, anyone?), there's a huge animatronic girl in knee length white socks who looks like Dora the Explorer should she ever visit the dark side, the acting is often performatively hammy, and episode two (of nine) is simply called Hell and starts with someone being burned alive.
The whole thing is overseen by a shady character known simply as The Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) who seems to spend his time either on the phone, speaking English, or listening to oddball jazz (the score, by Jung Jae-il, is suitably unsettling of course) and watching mechanical marionettes perform.
What the fuck is going on? Why is this weird shit happening? Where does all the money come from? What's The Front Man's motivation and what's in it for the staff? They live as if in a prison and are forced to become mass murderers. If their identity is revealed they get killed. Either the wages are phenomenally good or something else is going on.
What of the oft-mentioned VIPs? Who are they and what do they want? When Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon), a police officer, goes undercover in an attempt to find out what happened to his brother, who had played the squid game some years earlier, things only get more bizarre.
The games, of course, continue and as with most games, the Olympics or the World Cup for example, money remains the driver of everything. The games get ever more cruel (there's a particularly nasty twist when the marbles come out), the stakes remain the highest imaginable, and if the last few players left standing when the games reach their final rounds are predictable that doesn't affect the viewer's enjoyment of this peculiar spectacle.
Don't worry too much about what it all means. Just sit back and enjoy an original and unhinged piece of television (although I would seriously advise opting for subtitles over the dreadful dubbed American English version). Squid Game has all the makings of a cult classic. Yet we now live in such a strange world that instead of that it has become the most successful ever show on Netflix. Should the chance come to make a second series of it you can only imagine the colour of the light shown to Hwang Dong--hyuk will certainly not be red.
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