456 contestants play children’s games – with a deadly outcome.

With 111 million views (so far), and as the number one Netflix show in more than ninety countries, the phenomenon that is South Korea’s take on Hunger Games and Battle Royale is now earning itself acres of broadsheet analysis as to why it has grabbed the global imagination – none of which I’ve read, for fear of spoilers, as I’m only up to episode 6.

But, hey, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

Aside from the two obvious antecedents listed above, in 2020 Netflix gave us the Japanese series Alice In Borderland – another take on the ‘deadly games’ genre – which was, in many ways, technically better than Squid Game. It certainly did well enough to get recommissioned, so it’s interesting to explore why Squid Game is the show that has reached out beyond its ultraviolent genre pigeonhole and garnered this degree of attention and adulation.

Clearly there’s a zeitgeist thing going on about inequality, and a global sense that capitalism and the free market economy is an unwinnable and ultimately deadly game. Just how far would any of us go to get our hands on countless billions, suspended in a glowing glass globe, just out of reach, above our heads?

We saw the same themes played out in the 2019 South Korean Oscar winner, Parasite. It’s easy to see this as reductive and simplistic, however there’s something else going on here, something a little more complex. I’m not an expert on South Korean politics, but it only takes a rudimentary knowledge of history and geopolitics to know that the country is on the front line between the extremes of economic ideology, with communist North Korea next door – a constant reminder of a country torn in two by the dialectic that has defined world politics since the early twentieth century – so it’s hardly surprising that this underpins so much of the drama the South produces. Indeed, a key character in Squid Game is a North Korean defector.

Another character becomes an increasingly devout Christian as the drama, and bloodshed progresses, also resonant for a country where atheism prevails, but Buddhism and Christianity vie for dominance in the remaining population. These themes, clearly of significance to a South Korean audience, take the drama into rich territory exploring fatalism, karma, morality, faith. Generational tension plays a major role, as youngsters deride the middle aged ‘boomers’ and the elderly are treated both with veneration and contempt. I’ve not visited South Korea itself, but anyone who has been to South East Asia will have felt the way that generational respect is far higher on the social agenda than it is in many western countries – and in Squid Game it’s a key part of the story engine.

Perhaps the producers of Squid Game got lucky with their timing, but even if you are agnostic about capitalism, there is a growing sense around the world that the pursuit of profit may ultimately destroy the planet, and destroy humanity – but it’s a pursuit that deep down that none of us are prepared to relinquish. Perhaps it’s timing but never in my life time have the generations felt so pitted against each other, and a life or death exploration of those themes felt so relevant. Perhaps it’s timing but never in my lifetime has the battle between faith (and I don’t necessarily mean religious faith here) and science been so acute.

What I love about Squid Game is that does that thing that so many (British) commissioners and producers fail to understand when they tell a writer to change their story and script to make it more appealing to an ‘international’ audience (i.e. America). Squid Game is about as local, and specific to its own national concerns as it’s possible to be, but because writer/director Hwang Dong-hyuk feels his subject matter so personally, he infuses it with a warmth and passion that transcend national and cultural boundaries, in a way that makes us all better and more thoughtful people. Furthermore, he does it through the medium of blood and splatter. The violence is definitely disturbing, but the blood isn’t quite the right colour, the prosthetics never quite as realistic as they might be. In the wrong hands this could belittle and devalue the violence and its consequences, but for this viewer, it tells me that the series is actually exploring something else, something deeper, and it lets me in where a more convincingly graphic splatter-fest would have me, and presumably millions of others, reaching for the off switch.

Verdict: It’s an extraordinary achievement. 9/10

Martin Jameson