Squid Game: Red Light, Green Light

 “Would you like to play a game with me...?"

Yes; I've finally jumped on to the bandwagon. All the other series I'm blogging will continue, but Mrs Llamastrangler and myself will be watching this on most Fridays until we've done all nine episodes. So at last I'm starting to know what the fuss is about and hopefully understand some of those ubiquitous memes.

Essentially, before we even get to the premise, characters and themes, this is very well-directed, written and acted telly. Our main character, Gi-hun, is a poverty- and denbt-stricken fortysomething deadbeat dad and failure in life, who lives with and off his elderly mother. He has all sorts of character fkaws but means well, and is played superbly in an alternately comial and tragic performance from Lee Jung-jae, in a performance that had to be pitched perfectly for the whole thing to work.

We'll get to the gore in a bit, but this sereies is really about poverty. The poverty that grinds you down, steals your dignity, destroys your soul, removes your freedom and wastes yoiur life. There's some subtle politcal subtext here, in allowing us to see the unpleasant sides of desperate poverty, with its loan sharks, violence, humiliation and magical thinking that leads nowhere. Gi-hun getting slapped in the face for losing the game may be darkly funny, but the loan sharks are no better. There may be no humanity within the game, but there's none outside either.

The aesthetics of the games island are brilliant, with its bright, childlike colours, masked baddies and big boss ("Front Man") with his V mask and glasses of scotch. And the game itself is creepy; essentially What's The Time, Mr Wolf? with a big, creepy, plastic little girl. At first it's just eerie, but one player can't say still... and then he's shot. And things slowly build towards a massacre in which over half the debt-ridden, desperate players are killed.

This is brilliant. It reminds me, and I'm sure many others, of Saw. But the real horror here is poverty. A society without an adequate safety net is not a free society.