Squid Game tugs at the heart and shoots for the head

The South Korean TV sensation taps into the universal apprehensions of pressing debt, strained family relations and the longing for a better life.

Squid Game’s sudden and massive popularity aside, it is an involving and thought-provoking highwire act of genre thrills and modern anxieties.

A dystopian nightmare set in a fully-grounded here and now, Squid Game taps into the universal apprehensions of pressing debt, strained family relations and the longing for a better life. The show’s sudden and massive popularity aside, it is an involving and thought-provoking highwire act of genre thrills and modern anxieties that serves as both well-tooled entertainment and harrowingly cautionary morality tale.

At the centre of the show is divorced and conflicted everyman Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), whose downward trajectory began when he was laid off from a car factory a decade ago. A few business ventures have since failed, and he now claims to be a chauffeur yet is never seen behind the wheel. Instead, he spends his days gambling away the money of his long-suffering mother (Kim Young-ok) and clumsily trying to re-earn the trust of his daughter, Ga-yeong (Cho Ah-in), who is about to be relocated to America by her remarried mother (Kang Mal-geum).

Seong owes some very bad people a lot of money, and when he loses substantial winnings from the horse track to sly pickpocket and North Korean defector Kang Sae-byeok (Jung Ho-yeon) all seems lost. But when a mysteriously smiling and smartly-suited stranger (Gong Yoo) makes him an offer revealed to be Seong and 455 of his fellow financially distressed citizens playing six cherished South Korean children’s games (including the climactic title contest) over six days for a chance to survive and win the equivalent of $A53 million in cash, Seong sees an odd but very real path to security and redemption.

In a cavernous gymnasium at a secret remote island location, the track-suited and numbered contestants are briefed by a phalanx of masked guards in red jumpsuits and forced to sign a form stating the game’s rules: a player is not allowed to stop playing, a player who refuses to play will be eliminated and the games may be terminated if a majority of players agree to do so.

Seong hurriedly becomes acquainted with fellow contestants both familiar and new. Former schoolmate and supposed business whiz Cho Sang-woo (Park Hae-soo) is there, as is the surly pickpocket. Elderly gentleman Oh Il-nam (O Yeong-su) prefers to play rather than wait in the outside world for a recently-diagnosed brain tumour to take him, while arrogant and tattooed gangster Jang Deok-su (Heo Sung-tae) is only in it for himself. Rounding out the more prominent players are Pakistani foreign worker Abdul Ali (Anupam Tripathi) and wild-eyed and manipulative single mother Han Mi-nyeo (Kim Joo-ryung).

They find out soon enough that failure means instant death, and as their number is reduced, series writer and director Hwang Dong-hyuk ratchets up the melodramatic backstories in tandem with the mayhem.

Given the open-ended nature of the show’s concluding passages and all the attention garnered by its success, a second series would seem to be a no-brainer. Not so fast, says Hwang, who even on the page sounds weary after the extended and pressurised process of making Squid Game (“I’m not great at teamwork,” he has said). He’s also working on a new film script about an intergenerational war called KO Club.

“I don’t have well developed plans for Squid Game 2,” he confessed to Variety, “it is quite tiring just to think about it. But if I were to do it, I would certainly not do it alone. I’d consider using a writers’ room and would want multiple experienced directors.”

At this level of achievement, he’d almost certainly get all that and more from Netflix. Seen either as a cultural novelty or a genre-changing event, Squid Game manages to tug at the heart while shooting for the head.

Squid Game, streaming on Netflix.

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THE BITES

Guilty Party
Streaming on Paramount+

Readers who follow the behind-the-scenes manoeuvres that go into the casting of film and television shows may recall that Perth-reared Isla Fisher (Home and Away, Wedding Crashers) initially was cast as the lead in half-hour situation comedy Guilty Party. When she withdrew over pandemic-related concerns, British actress Kate Beckinsale (The Aviator, the Underworld film franchise) was hired to play the disgraced Colorado journalist (the show was shot in a Calgary winter) whose bumbling attempts to restore her reputation become risky and complicated when she takes on the story of woman imprisoned for murdering her husband who adamantly claims her innocence. At first blush a risky premise for a sitcom, the pair of episodes currently available of the eight that will be released weekly from next Friday reveal a weirdly bifurcated show that switches from loud, profane comedy to hushed yet charged prison confrontations in the blink of an eye. Where it’s going nobody knows, but the main reason to keep watching is Juilliard graduate and screen newcomer Jules Latimer, whose performance as the perhaps unjustly convicted Toni is as focused as the show itself is ill-defined. As for Beckinsale, she rises to her scenes with Latimer, though only time will tell if they have a hit on their hands.

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Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of National Lampoon
Friday October 15, 9pm, Fox Docos and Foxtel On Demand

“Looking backwards is always a dangerous position, you can really throw your neck out,” says Anne Beatts, the National Lampoon magazine staff writer whose notorious mock ad for a car Ted Kennedy should have driven to win the US presidency prompted a high-profile lawsuit in 1973. “But when I do look back at all of this, I feel lucky.” Viewers are as well: from the counterculture-inspired mid-1960s rise of the Harvard University humour magazine to the incalculably influential variety sketch show Saturday Night Live in 1975 (Beatts wrote for that, too) and the subsequent box-office dominance of the films Animal House, Caddyshack and National Lampoon’s Vacation, the 2015 feature-length History Channel documentary Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead charts the rise and resonance of a brand that changed the way Americans laughed. Well, the young and hip ones, anyway. Director and co-writer Douglas Tirola has lined up a cavalcade of prominent talking heads, including Chevy Chase, Virgin River’s Tim Matheson (Otter in Animal House) and director John Landis to reminisce about those halcyon days. Yet it is the lesser-known writing lights who shine brightest, magazine co-founder Henry Beard, writer Tony Hendra, satirist PJ O’Rourke and the many others whose luck rubbed off on comedy itself.

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Attack of the Hollywood Cliches!
Streaming on Netflix

Everybody knows Rob Lowe has a game sense of humour and a keen sense of the absurd, both of which were on display as early as the 1989 Oscar ceremony in the surreal duet he did with Snow White to a bastardised version of the Creedence Clearwater Revival hit Proud Mary (or, more precisely, the subsequent adrenalised Ike and Tina Turner cover of it). That same fearless mischievousness is on conspicuous display in Attack of the Hollywood Cliches! from producer Charlie Brooker (Black Mirror), an hour-long celebration of the tropes filmmakers depend on to get their points across in movies aimed at the masses. “Hi, unlike you I’m Rob Lowe, and I love movies,” he says brightly, before introducing a cavalcade of cliches that include everything from The Meet Cute to The Maverick Cop and The Angry Desk Sweep. Dozens of films, from 1925’s Russian masterwork Battleship Potemkin to last month’s Netflix remake of the 2018 Danish film The Guilty, are glimpsed in high-quality clips presented in their proper aspect ratios. True film tragics will thrill to the brief bit where Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon writer James Schamus reviews that legendary Hollywood in-joke The Wilhelm Scream. This may be frivolous, but it’s a lot of fun.