Squid Game

Superb acting performances heighten the drama, particularly from Lee, who makes Gi-hun irresistibly likable despite his many flaws. All of the characters undergo enormous trauma and transformation, and the actors rise to the challenge of portraying believable emotions in an unbelievable setting. A big part of the series' success lies in its dramatic and eye-catching aesthetic. ... What makes it so well-suited for binge-watching is how well Hwang uses pacing and cliffhangers to make the series absurdly addictive.

Hwang and his team take immense care with all of the players, laying out how they’re stuck in a horrible system, and just trying to make it through, at any cost. Squid Game is exciting, and startling, and tense, but that care is what really makes it worth watching.

The show is most intense and horrifying, most fully and confidently itself, at the moments when there seems to be no end to the abyss. The show’s gorgeous, intense visuals work best early, when it’s still full of mystery. ... As Squid Game’s ending reaches for answers and for a future, it gets less surprising and less visually virtuosic. It’s not the kind of apocalypse story that longs for hopeful human resilience; it’s most eloquent on the topics of financial despondence and weaponized nostalgia.

It’s black comedy at its bleakest, a tonal juxtaposition that is to be admired. I think it’s so effective, especially in a genre that is so extreme in its gore, that it masquerades as “fun.” ... Like Parasite, it uses genre as a Trojan horse for discussions about capitalism and class. We’re a culture attuned to hyper-violence, but the series manages to show it in a way that you never become desensitized.

Its messages hit like a sledgehammer to the head, yet this vibrant, vicious series holds a surprisingly big heart at its core. A winning blend of spectacle and sentiment.

The fate of the more sympathetic characters among them is where the drama lies. The ins and outs of the games are thrilling. When the team of scrappy protagonists—male and female, young and old—tugs and tugs at a rope, trying to drag a much stronger, all-male team over a precipice, I cheered for every step back they took, even though them winning would mean a bunch of other people would get crushed to death.

Squid Games takes a fresh idea and spins it into a thrilling drama; we hope it continues to build the tension we saw in the last 20 minutes throughout the season.

Ultraviolent and terrifically gripping thriller. [25 Oct - 7 Nov 2021, p.9]

There is some serious exploration of social and character dynamics in between sequences of mass carnage and gladiatorial combat. As these things go, “Squid Game” is fairly thoughtful, and the fact that there is no sexual component to the violence is something in its favor.

Solid thriller, good twists, too violent.

Murder is fetishized as a way to raise the stakes in a hazily political conversation without proposing a solution. ... To be clear, there is an obvious difference between spectatorship of real-world and fictional violence, even before Hwang’s script dramatically draws it out. But it might be easier to see that distinction if the pile of bodies had been slaughtered in service of an idea more interesting than that inequality is bad.