TV & Radio

What is Squid Game, Netflix’s ultraviolent breakout hit show?

Heavily indebted people play games in the hope of winning a cash prize. You lose, you die

Squid Game: the latest entry in the well-established genre of ‘death game’ dramas

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Ed Power
Thu Sep 30 2021 - 11:45

Squid Game? Sounds like a wacky dating show in which love-hungry singletons dress as molluscs. Is it on Virgin Media One – and are Jedward involved?
Obviously you've been nowhere near Netflix since September 17th, when season one of Squid Game made its debut. Already a global phenomenon, it is projected to eventually muscle aside Bridgerton and become Netflix's biggest ever hit.

If it's that popular it has to be a superhero series. Or a grisly true-crime documentary. Or Tiger King, but with… tentacles – Squid Sultan?
Rest assured there are no flapping capes or wavy mullets. Squid Game is the latest entry in the well-established genre of "death game" dramas. These combine gameshow-type formats with often gruesome violence, topped off with a sprinkling of satire. They're a big hit for Netflix, with examples including Alice in Borderland and #Alive. In Squid Game a group of financially embarrassed people in Korea compete for a cash prize by participating in challenges on a mysterious island.

What sort of challenges?
Traditional Korean kids' games. In Red Light, Green Light, players cross a sandy area, freezing in place whenever a giant spooky doll tells them to stop. There is also a "honeycomb" challenge, in which competitors cut shapes – umbrellas, stars– out of a disc of toffee-like candy.

Squid Game: much of the show's popularity has been driven by social media

Sounds like fun! And with a jackpot at the end too. How do I sign up?
It's entirely fictionalised and brought to the screen by the writer and director Hwang Dong Hyuk (The Fortress, My Father). Oh, and if you flop in any of these contests, your reward is a bullet to the brain.

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The official trailer for Squid Game, Netflix's breakout Korea drama in which hundreds of cash-strapped players compete in children's games - littered with deadly consequences - to win 45.6 billion won. Video: Netflix

That seems... dark
That's the other thing about Squid Game. It's incredibly violent. In the first episode more than 200 contestants are mown down with machine guns while playing Red Light, Green Light. In another scene a man is shot through the head at the top of a children's slide, leaving a bloody trail as he descends. It's visually arresting – but not for the faint-hearted.

So the formula is kids' games plus mindless violence? I'll stick with Tidying Up With Marie Kondo.
Squid Game can actually be watched as a visceral companion piece to Bong Joon-ho's Oscar-winning Parasite. That film interrogated class divisions in modern Korea and the desperate lengths to which people are driven by entrenched inequalities.

The Netflix hit wrestles with similar themes. Hero Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) is a gambling addict who risks losing his daughter unless he clears his debts. And when a man in a slick suit offers to make him rich in exchange for participating in a series of simple games, he feels he has no choice.

Desperation is similarly the motivating factor for the other players: one is a ruined business executive, another a refugee from North Korea. The real violence, it is implied, is that inflicted on the unfortunates in Korean society.

Isn't it really just the Hunger Games transplanted to Korea?
There are obvious similarities. But The Hunger Games wasn't the first franchise to pitch people in a duel to the death. It was seen as following in the footsteps of Battle Royale, the 1999 novel (and later movie) about Japanese schoolchildren fighting on an island. Squid Game is as much influenced by that as by The Hunger Games.

How did it become so popular so quickly?
Breakout hits are hard to predict. After Game of Thrones, who could have predicted HBO's next smash, Succession, would be a wry satire of the Murdoch media empire? In the case of Squid Game, however, much of the popularity has been driven by social media. In particular, it has blown up on TikTok, where users have been sharing Korean candy recipes and re-creating that chilling Red Light, Green Light game – without the machine guns, obviously.

You still haven't answered my original question. What is a Squid Game?
The series is named after a traditional Korean children's game in which players try to push one another outside an area shaped like a squid. Think of it as tag meets hopscotch, with a generous side serving of sudden death.