Squid Game
Showrunner: Hwang Dong-hyuk
Episodes: 9
Squid Game is a lot of things. Intense, character-driven survival drama, with a setup and gimmick so simple I won’t bother to explain it. Extended allegory for the world we live in, grounded in the real world. A Platonic ideal synthesis of works like Battle Royale and something like Oldboy. The Stranger Things of K-drama, as one friend quipped. But what it might be, more than anything else, is consistent. And consistency is a quality all of its own. The characterisation. The impeccable art direction and set design (Chae Kyoung-sun et al) The slow build and rapid, visceral release of tension. The aforementioned metaphor. All of it is committed to with 100% sincerity, for 100% of the runtime, allowing the whole show to come together into a unified whole with a serious impact.
Director Hwang Dong-hyuk states their intentions right away. Basically the whole first episode just lets us marinate in the conditions that will make the rest of the drama believable and emotionally real. And Lee Jung-jae has the chops to make this approach work as our protagonist, Gi-Hun. His performance as the deadbeat-who’s-good-at-heart is so pitch perfect at every moment, including when he is driven to breaking point, that when they introduce a very real, very intense strike at Ssangyong auto factory from a few years ago (remember what I said about being grounded in the real world?), as a pseudo-backstory, they only need seconds of vague footage and you already know how and why he came to be a part of the strike, and how it all turned out.
This consistency is vital, because it allows characters, that often are embodiments of social commentary, to always feel like people. Jung Hoyeon, as Kang Sae-byeok, and Kim Joo-Ryung, as Han Mi-nyeo, play out 2 opposed responses to sexism in the ultra-competitive world of both the games and the corporate neo-feudalism of postwar South Korea. Meanwhile, Anupam Tripathi as Ali and Park Hae-soo as Sang-woo, explore the dynamic between the increasingly downwardly mobile middle class and the hyper-exploited immigrant underclass. Everyone is bringing their A-game and leaving it all out there on the field, also special note should be made of the voice actors working the various dubs, voicing someone else’s performance is always a tall order. This approach to characterisation allows us to know why each character takes every action, meaning we are soaking in their emotions long before and long after they happen, especially as the violence ramps up, turning the contestants as cannibalistic as the eponymous cephalopods.
There is a similar effect with the violence. Dong-hyuk does not flinch from portraying bloody barbarity, but it’s in the vein of something like The Nice Guys, without the humour. It’s a gritty but awkward, real-world kind of violence that comes in explosive, emotional torrents. Grounding the action like this creates an effortless empathetic connection, for the same reason it’s so much easier to viscerally hate Dolores Umbridge compared to Voldemort in Harry Potter. It looks like something that could actually happen to us, even when the setup is surreal. I wonder if this is the reason the 2 most recent, non-Kpop, breakout media successes from South Korea have centred around implicit and obvious critiques of the Chaebol system, and the consequential inequality, at the heart of SK economics.
Squid Game speaks to the trajectory a lot of us feel we are on, a growing disparity that dehumanizes those it brutalizes and those it elevates, albeit in completely different ways. Due to quirks of how South Korea was reconstructed after the Korean war, they seem further along the curve than most of us. Which, along with some outstanding artists, as well as the still fairly recent (and very imperfect) relaxation of strict censorship laws, has produced some truly resonate works. That they are so evocative tell us a lot about how people experience the realities of our capitalist political and economic structures. Recommended to everyone who can stomach restrained but gruesome violence and gore, goes double for if you harbour any disaffection for the system you live in.
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