Everyone talks about it and everyone, without exception, admitted to having loved it: Squid Game is truly the revelation series of this Autumn. Korean, gory, twisted, cathartic, and not at all politically correct, Squid Game kept millions of viewers glued to the screen to binge-watch nine incredible episodes.
Directed by the enigmatic Hwang Dong-hyuk, the plot, based on a hopefully invented short story, starts in South Korea. It tells the story of a group of people who risk their lives in a deadly survival game Prize of 45.600.000.000 Won. So far it seems to be facing the classic Korean series in which survival games, usually performed by bizarre and somewhat clumsy participants, award billionaire prizes, but Squid Game is not like that.
In Squid Game, the cathartic aspect of the plot is fundamental: all players choose to participate in the games to give themselves the opportunity for a better life. In fact, the participants have in common stories of troubles with justice, debts, dramatic family events, and extreme poverty that lead them all to have nothing more to lose, if not to try everything in what will turn out to be a death trap. In fact, with a little unconsciousness, 456 participants agree to be drugged and taken to an island where they will take part in 6 games in which only one will reach the final prize pool (alive). Speaking of games, Squid Game takes its name from the game most loved by Korean children and which, from the title itself, creates a continuous reference to the world of children, reproducing typical childhood activities transformed into challenges with a decided splatter flavor.
Squid Game tells a cross-section of South Korea, in a new and captivating way, combining images of death with notes of classical music, in the slightly 90s style of A Clockwork Orange. The timing of the story alternate and at an inconsistent pace, passing from slow and profound stories to moments in which the plot is overturned within a few minutes, always keeping the viewer’s attention high.
What emerges in Squid Game are the social differences of a world, the Eastern one, which clashes with the power and richness of the Western one, giving a story that puts its most bloody and violent aspect into the background to prefer its more enigmatic and real one.