Lurking beneath the gore are moments of wit and sensitivity: Squid Game reviewed

Should we be worried that Squid Game is the most popular show in Netflix’s history? If it’s a case of art imitating life, then the prognosis for our civilisation is not good: most of us will die, horribly, sooner rather than later, but for the very few who survive there will be untold riches to enjoy in the company of the cruel and capricious controlling super-elite.

Squid Game is a Korean update of the Japanese cult classic Battle Royale (2000) which spawned — or revived; let’s not forget Rollerball (1975) — the genre known as ‘death games’. These films take place in a dystopian future where ordinary, desperate folk compete in a series of gladiatorial to-the-death contests for the amusement of the ruling oligarchy. Recentish examples include The Hunger Games trilogy and Maze Runner.

Part of their appeal to the young, of course, is the depressive hit of seeing lots of characters whom you’ve got to know and like meet imaginative and upsetting deaths. In Squid Game, the various fatal competitions are based on traditional Korean childhood games. One, familiar in the West as Grandmother’s Footsteps, requires you to steal your way forward, pausing stock still whenever ‘Grandmother’ looks round. Except in this case, the penalty for being caught out is to be instantly shot dead.

After the first round of slaughter, the surviving contestants are outraged at being exposed to such butchery. Surely this sort of thing shouldn’t be allowed? But then greed gets the better of them. All have been selected because they are massively in debt with no hope of earning their money back by normal means. Forcing them to realise that they are in this evil show by choice rather than because they are mere victims just adds to their humiliation — and increases their hunger to kill.

The show has a distinctive aesthetic somewhere between The Prisoner and one of those primary-coloured soft-play indoor amusement centres, only with squealing toddlers replaced by masked guards in red hooded jump suits and dying contestants.