The fact that most contestants elect to remain in this hellish torture chamber (as one of the characters acidly points out, it’s “just as bad out there as it is in here”) is an indictment of modern society, told in the darkest, funniest way possible. And how he does this is through one of the show’s small but clever departures from battle royale convention: the contestants are given a choice, to stay or go.
People who are barely managing to keep their heads above water in a system designed to crush their spirits and strip them of every dignity. What Hwang Dong-hyuk wants us to know is that these are not bad people. ‘These are people who are barely managing to keep their heads above water in a system designed to crush their spirits.’ Photograph: Netflix A case of PTSD was followed by the breakdown of his marriage, and some of the show’s most painful scenes are between Seong Gi-hun and the light of his life – his 10-year-old daughter – who will soon move with her mother and stepfather to the United States.Īnd so it is with every one of these contestants, an almost Dickensian suffering is threaded through their backstories: a teenage North Korean defector at the mercy of people smugglers-cum-scam artists an impoverished Pakistani migrant worker whose factory boss refuses to pay his wages a businessman whose weight of social pressure and expectation drives him to commit riskier and riskier deals. Later we learn how Seong Gi-hun’s life took a turn for the worse when, following layoffs at his car factory, he witnessed his colleague killed at a worker’s strike. In a wonderfully expressive depiction by Lee Jung-jae, his emotions-writ-large moves us effortlessly from the heart-wrenching guilt of seeing his long-suffering mother head wearily to work to the slapstick humour of raiding the cookie jar for her credit card before hitting the racetrack.
Our protagonist Seong Gi-hun is a part-time chauffeur, full-time gambling addict. The fact the money is won via childlike games (red light, green light tug of war) has a touch of Lord of the Flies about it: oh how quickly “civilised” people devolve into savagery.īut what is not captured in the trailer is how bighearted the show is, how joyfully funny and compassionate it is to its characters. Like a dumb dare question on TikTok, it revels in showing us through a gleeful splatterfest exactly what sick, depraved things an ordinary person might do for a life-changing amount of cash. On one level, Squid Game is your classic Faustian bargain.
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