“Okay,” says the incredulous and increasingly irritated substation cop, “let me just sum up everything you’ve told us so far, just so I understand. You went to play kids’ games because someone told you you’d get all that cash. So then they had you play Red Light, Green Light, and they shot everyone who got caught. But when you said you wanted to go, they said, ‘Okay, just go,’ and you don’t know what they look like or where this all took place. Is that everything, mister?” ]
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Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), the officer’s audience, once fully confident in his account of the games, the gunfire, and their grisly aftermath, goes from bold to sheepish as he hears his words echoed back to him. It’s a scenario too grand, too brutal, too inhuman to imagine: Somewhere, somehow, someone has accumulated enough resources to marshal a private army, tempt strangers from around South Korea into participating in a 6-stage series of “games” for cash prizes, kidnap 456 of those strangers, and hold them in an undisclosed remote location where the games commence. They are not fun. People lose more than an eye. It’s a horrific and miserable affair for the players. For the streaming audience at home, it’s colorful, shocking, and shamefully entertaining. It’s “Squid Game,” your new streaming obsession.
Netflix’s latest (and completely unexpected) hit series comes to U.S. viewers all the way from South Korea, the land of Park Chan-wook, Bong Joon-ho, and dozens of other great filmmakers unknown to swaths of American audiences because Park and Bong are the only Korean names they have the bandwidth to remember. Maybe they’ll make room for Hwang Dong-hyuk, too; “Squid Game’s” popularity is quite possibly as much a surprise to him as to Netflix and to American critics, who can’t seem to find another reference point for the show than “Parasite.” Admittedly, “Parasite” does feel like kin to “Squid Game”: A merciless class critique focused largely on conflict whipped up between the have-nots by the haves. But that film and this show approach that motif from different angles and have little else in common. There’s no 1% class here. There are instead faceless agents of social attenuation.
Hwang’s lead is Gi-hun, though he’s merely one protagonist among an ensemble that includes seven others. Gi-hun has a problem: He’s a bum. He’s a bum for about a half dozen reasons, comprising a blend of bad luck and worse decision-making skills, but a bum nonetheless. With empty pockets on his daughter’s (Cho Ah-in) birthday, he goes to the racetrack, bets big, wins big, is shaken down big by friendly neighborhood loan sharks, and ends the evening a loser as is his habit. (He’s also divorced, in case that needs to be said.) Then, a stroke of fortune, neither good nor bad. Waiting for a train, Gi-hun meets a nameless nattily-dressed man (“Train to Busan‘s” Gong Yoo) who gives him a chance to make fistfuls of money by playing a game. The man leaves the details fuzzy. When, at the end of the first episode, “Red Light, Green Light,” the details come into sharp relief via the percussive reports of gunfire.
“Squid Game’s” influences are abundant. Beyond the works of Hwang’s South Korean peers: Films like “Battle Royale,” “Escape Room,” and E. L. Katz’s terrific “Cheap Thrills,” a movie about a bored married couple possessed of immeasurable wealth who pit two friends against each other in a series of sickening pranks and dares. “Squid Game” actually feels closest to that movie for sheer visceral impact; overarching commentaries on South Korea’s problems with wealth inequality and financial/political scandals, as in corruption perpetrated by the state-run developer Korea Land and Housing Corp., give Hwang’s story senses of time and specificity. But the questions posed by “Squid Game” and “Cheap Thrills” remain the same: How much does your loyalty to your friends, your family, and to your fellow man cost? What would you do to yourself and to others for a quick, easy buck, give or take several billion?
The stakes are so incalculable that judgment feels petty. “Squid Games” has no illusions about its characters’ relative morality; not all of them are “bad,” but practically none of them are “good.” Gi-hun is a deadbeat with a gambling problem, a guy who would steal from his own mother instead of getting a job; Sang-woo (Park Hae-soo), Gi-hun’s old childhood chum, embezzled so much money from his securities company’s clients that the cops are out for his arrest; Sae-byeok (Jung Ho-yeon), a North Korean defector, is hellbent on getting her parents over the border by any means necessary; Mi-nyeo (Kim Joo-ryoung) tries to pass herself as a single mom to dubious effect; gangster Deok-su (Heo Sung-tae) is so in over his head with his own gambling debts that his organs are up for grabs. Elderly tumor patient Il-nam (O Yeong-su) and Pakistani worker Ali (Anupam Tripathi) are the 2 most moral people mixed up in the game.
Still, apart from Deok-su, “Squid Game” reserves scrutiny. There’s probably not a single soul out there who wouldn’t at least consider playing a life-and-death game where the prize is financial stability for life, and when the starting roster of 456 starts out trying to secure that prize for themselves, the impulse to condemn them for going with the flow disappears. Hwang puts so many people on the board that we immediately wonder if we, too, would sign away our safety for the chance at winning big. This, in the large tradition of “rich people make sport of the poor” genre niche, feels somewhat new. Even newer is the introduction of democracy into that class dynamic. In Episode 2, “Hell,” the players all vote to end the game in accordance with the rules laid out by their hosts. Amazingly, the game ends.
But the show goes on. Living on the precipice of bankruptcy isn’t a way to live. There is, perhaps, a conflict of a sort between “Squid Game’s” aesthetic and its material; Hwang gives the show a slick, handsome veneer, as rich in detail as the organization that’s behind the games is in resources. Grime clutters in the corners and at the edges, but for the most part, it’s barely window dressing. Whenever the plot takes us to the compound where the games commence, that grime disappears entirely, replaced by a visual sense best described as a head-on collision between M.C. Escher and “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.” It’s glorious and weird, a combination to savor in a series that demands savoring.
Would “Squid Game” be improved with the addition of grit and grain? Probably not. It isn’t a series worth improving on, after all, an unpredictable smash that, like every South Korean show or film Americans latch onto, has unflattering views about the wealthy and a deft hand at turning class assessment into propulsive art. Hwang knows how much convincing he needs to do to bring his viewers on board with the premise; unlike the cop, the audience will buy into “Squid Game’s” world without a fuss, a credit to Hwang’s skills as a filmmaker and writer. Forget the negative connotations the phrase “bingeworthy” stirs up. In the binge era, this show is as good as they come. [A]
“Squid Game” is available now on Netflix.