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The sun doesn’t always shine on TV this time of year, with listings usually dominated by repeats, reality shows and disposable dramas. But the release of the third and final season of the megahit Korean thriller Squid Game (the most watched series in Netflix’s history) means that the small screen has its very own summer blockbuster.
The mood of this climactic six-part instalment is, however, unseasonably dark; the brutality is more bracing, the twists more chilling in a show that used to lighten its myriad horrors with streaks of day-glo whimsy.
After a rather abrupt end to the previous season, the story picks up in the immediate aftermath of the quashed uprising at the playground-cum-colosseum where desperate individuals compete in deadly schoolyard games for cash. Having failed to take down the tournament’s overseer or convince enough people to vote to end the contest, our bruised hero Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) and his fellow rebels realise that their only way out is to win.
Where most of the lethal games have hitherto been about survival and strategy, this season more brazenly pits self-interest against humanity; moral absolutes against short-term financial gain. The first game (a savage spin on hide-and-seek that plays out in an arena resembling an MC Escher fever dream) rewards the cold-blooded and punishes the compassionate; the last has a queasy psychological element with players given more control of their fate.
Exhilaratingly paced and sharply directed, the series still makes for compulsive viewing. Yet much of the macabre fun from the breakout first season seems to have been lost along the way. Here sweaty-palmed action rarely comes unburdened from eye-dampening tragedy. The result is less diverting but more emotionally engaging — visceral thrills replaced by dread for those protagonists in whom we become invested. Among them are an expectant young mother and her protectress (a trans ex-Marine); a 70-something woman and her hapless adult son, and of course Gi-hun himself, now haunted by his unsuccessful crusade against the games’ shadowy “frontman” (Lee Byung-hun).
If these characters draw us into this lurid, ludicrous world, others take us straight out of the story. Returning to the show are the VIPs: a group of billionaires who come to observe and bet on the competition put on for their amusement. Between the clunky English-language script and the hammiest performances you’ll find outside of regional panto, their presence routinely undercuts moments of pain and pathos and weakens the series’ ink-black satire of cut-throat capitalism.
But while the VIPs are a broad send-up of amoral elites, they also might be seen as an analogue for those of us bingeing on the bloodshed at home. What does it say about our society, the show tacitly asks, that this ghoulish tale is so popular?
At times, series creator Hwang Dong-hyuk seems not unlike the cynical “frontman”, putting on an ultraviolent spectacle that revels in the cruelty and greed that exists below the surface of ordinary people. At others, he’s like Gi-hun and his gang, trying to appeal to empathy and cling to belief in human goodness. Hwang leaves this battle of world views poised on a knife-edge going into the finale — but Netflix, you suspect, will be the big winners either way.
★★★☆☆
On Netflix now
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