Squid Game Review

The design does half the work. Candy coloured staircases in impossible perspective, tracksuits in green and pink, an enormous animatronic doll in a schoolyard, all of it deliberately childish so that the violence lands as obscenity rather than spectacle. But the show is far more careful than its reputation suggests. Every player is given a specific debt, and the specificity is the point: a laid off factory worker, a defector paying smugglers, a migrant worker cheated of wages, a fund manager who gambled with other people's money.

The sixth episode, in which pairs are told to play marbles and only one may survive, is a genuinely great piece of television and would work with no premise at all. Lee Jung-jae is superb as a weak man who keeps choosing correctly by accident. The flaws are consistent across all three seasons. The English speaking masked spectators are written and performed at a level far below everything around them, the policeman infiltration subplot is a distraction, and the later seasons keep escalating scale where the first found meaning in constraint.