Maybe it goes without saying, but like most episodes of Squid Game, this is a nasty bit of work. The episode stays fairly light until the end, characterized by joking banter between the loan sharks on one hand and Jun-ho and the fisherman (Oh Dal-su) who plucked him out of the sea after the Season 1 finale and now helps him search for the island. Then, all of a sudden, you have a protracted scene of queasy brutality and emotional torture straight out of The Deer Hunter, set to opera. This is followed almost immediately by a very similar scene in which the sociopathic Recruiter positively beams with joy over being a sociopath before shooting himself to death on camera. It’s a lot, but it’s supposed to be. If individual viewers find it’s too much to justify what is at root not all that different from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s The Running Man in conceptual terms, I get it.
But it sure looks good. We haven’t yet immersed ourselves in the pink pastel hellscape of the Game’s HQ yet, but the red and green lighting that falls on Gi-hun and the Recruiter during their face off, along with a sudden cut that jumps the 180-degree line so we suddenly see the bright red window against which they’re seated, had me thinking favorably of Drive director Nicholas Winding Refn’s own beautifully colored foreign-language Netflix thriller, Copenhagen Cowboy. (Go watch it, it rules.)
The most important contrast in this scene isn’t one of color, however, but of character, or more accurately of performance. Gong Yoo is positively demonic as the Recruiter here — eyes gleaming with the joy of cruelty, voice not skipping a beat when he reveals he killed his own father, mouth agape and grinning as he almost lewdly inserts the barrel of his gun into it before pulling the trigger. Lee Jung-jae, meanwhile, retains the sad-sack lovability that endeared him to audiences in the original, but it’s now tempered by trauma, grief, guilt, and the horror of knowledge. You still want this dear man to win, or at least to survive. Under the rules they make us play by, that’s usually the closest to winning you can get.
I’m covering the second season of Squid Game for Decider, starting with my review of the premiere.
Tags: decider, horror, squid game, TV, TV reviews