I Would Be The First Person To Lose ‘Squid Game’

The truth behind the new hit Korean drama on Netflix

I am going to spoil Squid Game so consider this your only warning: I would get shot in the head within the first few minutes of the first game, an old-fashioned children’s playground game called Greenlight/Redlight.

The rules are simple. A leader says “green light,” which means everyone can run towards a finish line but when that leader says “red light,” everyone must stop immediately. In Squid Game, the leader of Greenlight/Redlight is a giant robotic schoolgirl that can detect the slightest movement in a player. Her voice is sweet and playful and if you twitch you lose, which means instant death by sniper’s bullet.

Squid Game is a fight for your life and millions of dollars. I could sure use millions of dollars. I’d pay off my credit card debt and, I don’t know, buy a tropical island. But the moment the show turns sinister, and the plot is revealed, I grimly realized I would never survive Greenlight/Redlight, or any of the other five games, each playful and deadly.

I have described Squid Game to friends as a combination of Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite and the Japanese action-thriller Battle Royale from 2000, a movie that Hunger Games more or less ripped off. The show is emotional and sardonic and deeply critical of capitalism, like Parasite, and it’s also about survival of the fittest.

I cannot recommend this Korean drama enough. Currently streaming on Netflix, Squid Game is inspired. Every part works. The world-building is authentic. The satire is withering. It’s one of the few shows this year that demands binging.

I could go on and I will: the creepy pink and green costumes and stylized MC Esher-like sets are demented and disorienting, and the games themselves are terrifying.

But this is an ensemble show and the cast is superb, every actor delivers powerful, nuanced performances. As a gambling addict and deadbeat dad, Lee Jung-jae is both pathetic and surprisingly heroic, when he has to be. Park He Soo’s Cho Sang-Woo, a brilliant investment banker with a dark past, is brilliant as is Ho-yeon Jung as Sae-Byeok, a pickpocket who needs money to get her family out of North Korea.

Indian actor Anupam Tripathi plays a sweet and loyal immigrant laborer and Oh Young-soo steals every scene he is in as a dying old man whose wisdom comes in handy. Gong Yoo, who I immediately recognized from the horror movie Train to Busan, has a memorable cameo as a mysterious salesman who recruits players, all of them desperate in one way or another.

I should also mention Kim Joo-ryung as Han Mi-nyeo, a scrappy, clever kook who will do anything to win. Just an excellent group of actors.

Squid Game is about 456 people who wake up in a secret facility and are told they will play six games, and after every game, a giant plastic pig will fill with money for the survivors. Everything is simple: the rules, the games, the murders. Each player needs money, they chose to be there, and none of them know who their mysterious captors/benefactors are since they wear masks with simple shapes on them. A circle is a sort of worker drone. A triangle is a soldier. A square is a leader. The Darth Vader-y person in charge is known simply as the Front Man.

There are multiple subplots, including a cop infiltrating the world of Squid Game’s nameless, masked henchmen. But the focus of the show is the game itself, and the players. The violence in Squid Game is bloody and perfunctory, mostly gunshots at point-blank range. Executions. Each bang is jarring and appalling and I think it could be upsetting to sensitive viewers. But if you’re a fan of horror movies, you’ll be fine.

Squid Game’s critique of capitalism is front and center as the haves watch and bet on which of the have nots will live to play another game. The haves are known as the VIPS, a group of men wearing shiny metal animal faces. These rich and powerful men are all American, save for one dude who is Chinese.

That most of these brutes are American is not lost on me. South Korea has a strong, but complicated, relationship with America, especially since 30,000 U.S. soldiers are stationed there and have been for the last 64 years. There is something brutally American, too, about the contest. In America, capitalism is very much a blood sport.

The series isn’t flawless, though. There are a few homophobic moments in Squid Game (one of the villains is a gross creep who gropes and threatens a male waiter.) There is also a sexist undercurrent but the cast really does great work saving the script when it sometimes stumbles into lazy stereotypes.

I think it’s fair to bring these slight blemishes up. The show is so well-done that those imperfections really pop.

Squid Game has become a sudden mega-hit for Netflix and I worry that means there’s going to be an English-language remake (an American version of Train to Busan is happening, which they should call Amtrak to Poughkeepsie.)

I don’t think America is ready for a show as raw and emotional and honest as Squid Game. Drowning in debt — school loans, medical bills, mortgages — is basically the national pastime. Squid Game dramatizes modern capitalism, an increasingly antiquated system that rewards cruelty and dishonesty and seemingly exists to only increase inequality. The villains in Squid Game are, presumably, the people we’re told to look up to, and to strive to be, namely, those with the most cash.

An American version of Squid Game won’t have the same bite. There are large swaths of the public can don’t want to hear the show’s original message: money turns people into animals.

Let me know what you think of the show in the comments. How long would you last? Greenlight!