Squid Game: South Korea's latest cultural phenomenon

The show is the latest manifestation of the ever-growing influence of South Korea's popular culture

A dystopian vision of a polarised society, Netflix smash hit "Squid Game" blends a tight plot, social allegory and uncompromising violence to create the latest South Korean cultural phenomenon to go global.

It features South Korea's most marginalised, including the deeply in debt, a migrant worker and a North Korean defector, competing in traditional children's games for the chance to win 45.6 billion won ($38 million) in mysterious circumstances.

The juxtaposition of innocent childhood pastimes and terminal consequences -- coupled with high production values and sumptuous set design -- has proved wildly popular around the world.

It is the latest manifestation of the ever-growing influence of South Korea's popular culture, epitomised by K-pop sensation BTS and the subtitled Oscar-winning movie "Parasite".

"The growing tendency to prioritise profit over the wellbeing of the individual" is a "phenomenon that we witness in capitalist societies all over the world," Sharon Yoon, a Korean studies professor at the University of Notre Dame in the United States, told AFP.

Netflix in February announced plans to spend $500 million this year alone on series and films produced in South Korea.  

"Our commitment towards Korea is strong. We will continue to invest and collaborate with Korean storytellers across a wealth of genres and formats," he added.

That has created a vibrant cultural scene whose different forms have established ever larger foreign audiences over the decades.

Auteur Bong Joon-ho's Oscar winner is a vicious satire about the widening gap between rich and poor, exploring the meaning of modern-day poverty in what is now the world's 12th largest economy.

"Squid Game" director Hwang Dong-hyuk finished his script a decade ago but failed to attract funding as investors were reluctant and called it "too bloody, unfamiliar and abstruse".

And the television series -- his first -- makes clear references to several traumatising collective experiences that have shaped the psyche of today's South Koreans, including the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the 2009 layoffs at Ssangyong Motor, both of which saw people take their own lives.

Social mobility had become "much less possible" now than before 1997, he said, "and the trauma of deepening inequality... is spilled onto the screens".

Brian Hu, a film professor at San Diego State University in the United States, said the fact it was popular in almost 100 countries was evidence it was not made only for Western viewers.

"The unique thing about 'Parasite' and 'Squid Game' is that while the works depict poverty and class inequality, they do so in a way that exerts Korea's technical and cinematic modernity."

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