Game for the Korean hit horror show

This reality TV game horror show is savage just like Season 1. The original brutal Korean satire, an allegory for the ills of capitalism, which became a worldwide phenomenon when it was first aired in 2021, has had a record run, garnering more than 265 million viewers from all over the world. The second season, a seven-episode build-up to a previously announced concluding third season that’s expected in 2025, may not be as gravitating as the first season, but it has enough brutal moments to hold you in thrall.

Candy-coloured sets, masked guards in pink jumpsuits and contestants dressed in matching green tracksuits, one-up gamesmanship and butchering continue to be the mainstay.

Series one centred around Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), a gambling addict who joined 455 other destitute people who find themselves trapped on an island playing games like marbles with a deadly twist. If they failed to win, they were murdered by the guards.

The prize money for the winner got upped by 100 million Korean won ($70,000/£55,000) every time somebody was killed. The last player standing was expected to win 45.6 billion won ($31m/£25m). Desperation was the key.

The second season, like the first, written and directed by Hwang, begins after the first season finale: Lee Jung-jae’s Gi-hun, despondent after watching more than 400 persons slaughtered and despite winning 45.6 billion in the Game, cancels plans to visit his daughter in the US, and instead vows to find the elusive Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) and put an end to the Game for good.

The macabre Korean-language dystopian horror series is replete with violence and spine-chilling murders, given that it is a brutal satire on the wealth divide and class disparity in South Korea.

The first time we see Gi-hun in the second season, he is naked and bloody in a public bathroom and gouging out tracking chips that have been implanted in his flesh. A young boy enters and Gi-hun is quick to say, “I’m sorry… could you give me five minutes?” The macabre humour of that moment whittles down the tension a notch. The later episodes find Gi-hun pulled back into a brand new round of ‘Squid Game’. Later on, in another ironically funny moment, we see Gi-hun recruiting the mob squad of his former loan sharks to scour the subway stations of Seoul. They’re trying to find the man in the suit (Lee Byung-hun), who plays the paper envelope ddakji game and recruits players for the ‘Squid Game’. It’s clear from these two instances that the satire is more in your face this time round.

It’s a sadistic, gory and violent show with hundreds of gruesome, point-blank murders. Among the fresh players in the blank slate, there’s a mother and her gambling-addict son (Yang Dong-geun and Kang Ae-shim), vulnerable young women, ex-Marines, a crypto influencer (Im Si-wan), a menacing, pill-popping rapper (real-life rapper Choi Seung-hyun, also known as T.O.P.) who has lost all his money after buying cryptocurrency, cis-actor Park Sung-hoon playing a thinly developed trans character and a desperate woman, No-eul (the quietly intense Park Gyu-young) who escaped North Korea while having been forced to leave her baby behind.

For most of the players, death in a schoolyard game is preferable to what awaits them on the outside.

It’s a fictional bleak, sadistic deeply-disturbing world representing the current scenario where people become expendable as rulers grapple for the bigger slice of cake. ‘Squid Game S2’ is ultraviolent, menacing, bloody-minded while broadly expanding on the themes of its predecessor.

The early episodes are all rather ordinary. There are chase scenes, car crashes, gunfights powered by a quest for vengeance. The last episode doesn’t give the feel that the end is near. It feels like the series is dragging and gratuitous in its ambitions for another season.

In a press note, the director Hwang claimed that through the players in the game, he wanted to point out that things that were bizarre and unrealistic a decade ago have sadly become very realistic now. But ‘Squid Game S2’ doesn’t come across as a psycho-social representation of the world we live in. It’s more dystopian and unhinged than what we’ve experienced in real life.