In the end, it’s both beautiful and brutal. All-out mass murder in a blue-and-red darkness. Muzzle flashes erupting from dozens of crevices in a vast pastel cavern. Desperate men and women fighting to the last bullet. Lovable characters cracking under pressure. A final betrayal in the royal purple corridors of power. The season finale of Squid Game is everything you’d want from a season finale of Squid Game…except for the “finale” bit. There’s nothing final about this episode at all. 

I reviewed the season finale of Squid Game for Decider.

By the time you finish this season of Squid Game, you will have witnessed hundreds of murders. Hundreds! It’s baked right into the premise. Other than shows that involve actual war, this kind of body count is just unprecedented. It’s certainly unique in that in virtually every case the murder victims are unarmed and helpless, and are getting killed because they messed up while playing a children’s game. 

The question I ask myself when I watch things like this is simply, Why? Why am I watching something in which human lives are discarded like garbage, in graphic on-screen deaths so numerous you need the show to keep track of them for you? Is this some high-octane action-movie thing that’s using murder the way roller-coasters use downward slopes — to shock your system and give you a thrill? Does the violence have weight, does it cause emotional pain, does it speak to something broader than “look out for armed men in pink jumpsuits”? In short, what does the violence communicate, and is it a message worth hearing?

I’m wrestling with this question, I’ll admit. That’s because I think it’s very obvious Squid Game does, indeed, have something to say. The cartoonish bluntness with which its premise is stated — poor and indebted people are pitted against one another in sadistic games for a chance to win enough money to become solvent again, in a sham quasi-democracy overseen by the world’s richest men — tricks the mind into thinking it’s simplistic. 

But read that premise again, and tell me how it differs from conditions on the ground right here and now. Friends, the real world is simplistic at this point. Just as the lethal games are designed to evoke fun childhood pastimes, Squid Game just renders the real world’s cruel absurdity in caricature form. 

There is, however, such a thing as diminishing returns. With only one episode remaining in this short season, and a longer one behind us already, it’s fair to wonder what this heap of several hundred green-tracksuited corpses tells us that we didn’t learn from the previous pile. 

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Squid Game Season 2 for Decider.

Recapping this episode of Squid Game is a daunting prospect. Not because it’s complicated — on the contrary, it’s a simple as these things get. The players play a game, the survivors take a vote and then a break, they bond with each other, they start a new game, there are brief detours for the No-eul and Jun-ho side plots, the end. 

No, the problem stems from how much of the energy of Squid Game is lost if you summarize it. I mean, the show really is as simple as it sounds above. The characters sound equally sketched out when you break them down in text form: the kindly old woman, the genial jarhead, the arrogant celebrity, the gentle trans woman, the surprisingly human villain, and so on. I found all their interactions compelling, but if I were to sum up their conversations without the benefit of the performances conveying them, they’d seem gossamer thin.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Squid Game‘s second season for Decider.

The clock is ticking on Squid Game, and I don’t just mean for the contestants. In a short season of just seven episodes, we’ve just completed Episode 4 and haven’t even finished our second game out of six. Will the remaining games get rushed through via montage or some other means? Will the competition get cut short, perhaps by Gi-hun and Jun-ho’s mercenary team? Will the season finale end with a big TO BE CONTINUED? No matter the outcome, the result is going to be paced quite differently from the previous season. In other words, we’re guaranteed something novel.

I reviewed episode 4 of Squid Game Season 2 for Decider.

So much of what makes this episode good is also what makes it familiar: the giant doll, the X and O voting, the “Greta Gerwig’s Barbie remixed by M.C. Escher” staircase set by production designer by Chae Kyoung-sun, But what sells the drama of it all, what makes it feel like more than just a rehash, is what has changed: Gi-hun. When we see flashes of the initial season, he looks like a different person, floppy-haired and fresh-faced. Actor Lee Jung-jae’s transformation is subtle, but it’s like an optical illusion or a Magic Eye poster: Once you train yourself to see it, it’s kind of mind-blowing.

I reviewed Squid Game Season 2’s third episode for Decider.

For a director whose signature achievement is capturing claustrophobically cheery sets, Squid Games‘ Hwang Dong-hyuk has a hell of an eye for exterior shots. An amusement park, a hospital, a bridge underpass, even Gi-hun’s run-down Pink Motel: They’re all given a real sense of scale, color, drama by Hwang’s camera. Even given how gorgeously creepy all the interiors are once we get to the island and its game complex, I’ll still miss the view.

I reviewed the second episode of Squid Game Season 2 for Decider.

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.

 Jet Wilkinson is a director who tends to do whatever he’s doing as well as it can be done, and in this case he takes the challenge of filming a gloomy horror climax about grief and sets it against a background of hard gray wintry afternoon light. There are shots of Eli alone on the shore stronger and eerier than any of the show’s more explicit horror moments.

Which, I suppose, speaks to Before’s bigger problem: It’s a horror show that was never particularly scary. Surprising, intriguing, occasionally disgusting? Yes. An odd but effective vehicle for Billy Crystal to stretch his legs by playing, basically, a maniac who should never be let near a child again? Definitely. Something that made me afraid, the way Twin Peaks or Channel Zero or Them or the first season of The Terror made me afraid? No. That may matter to you, it may not, but as a Horror Person I feel it bears mentioning. 

I reviewed the series finale of Before for Decider.

This climactic act of self-harm is one of Before’s gnarliest moments yet, which is saying something. I’ve yet to find the show genuinely scary — the rapid editing of many of the frightening visions and the breakneck pace of these short episodes overall largely preclude building any sense of real dread — but it’s admirably disgusting, that’s for sure. Billy Crystal just did the Joker’s disappearing pen trick on his own hand, for crying out loud. Not something you see every day!

[…]

All of this happens in the timespan of a network sitcom, which is wild to me. The show’s speed and staccato rhythm are unique, that’s for sure, though I’m not convinced they’re good for tension, fear, or atmosphere. What they do provide is an effective simulacrum of what Eli Adler’s battered brain must be going through. By the end of any given episode, you’ve seen so many insects and torn pages and bodily injuries and drowned ghosts and shots of Eli screaming in the snow, and (this is especially true of this episode) heard increasingly maddening noises like the drip-drop of a bathtub, the tick-tock of a clock, or the click-clack of a retractable pen, that shish-kebab’ing your hand almost feels like a reasonable response. 

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Before for Decider.

It may have taken eight episodes, a shocking confession, an imaginative method of storytelling, a surfeit of eerie old photos (featuring a vanishing young Eli, notably), and a scary dream-farmhouse to get it there, but Before has some real dark energy to it now. Let’s hope that energy keeps building.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Before for Decider.

Dr. Eli Adler is not a Velvet Underground fan. I don’t know how else to explain his bafflement when Noah, his mysterious patient, puts on VU’s devastating junkie epic “Heroin,” causing the late addict Benjamin Walker’s brother Lawrence to break down and cry. Eli, I’m begging you, at least pick up The Velvet Underground and Nico! (Loaded too, if you want a different kind of sound, but that’s really neither here nor there.)

If I’m making light of this moment it’s not because I wasn’t affected it. Oh, on the contrary. In my review of last week’s episode I made no bones about my admiration for character actor Lenny Venito, who plays Lawrence…or Lonnie, as Noah calls him when he apologizes to him, speaking as his junkie brother Benjamin. Between the boy and the song and his memories of his brother playing it for him over and over — parents, this is a warning sign, but maybe it was also the only way the guy could communicate what he was going through to his baby brother — Lawrence crumbles. Using the incredible power of the song (they don’t even get to the part where Lou Reed sings the word “heeeeeeee-rooo-innnn” like the exhalation of a dying man) and Venito’s excellent performance, the show really makes you feel for the man, and for the brother he lost.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Before for Decider.

Part of the problem with Before’s barely-half-an-hour run time and the resulting pacing of the storytelling is that you feel like you might have covered just this much ground in, like, an episode and a half of an hour-long drama about the exact same topic. However, now that we’ve got enough of the show under our belt, the vision is becoming more apparent. I still can’t say Before is scary, and that’s the biggest knock on it; horror TV shows should frighten you, full stop. But I do find the supernatural mystery becoming more compelling as the wriggly, wormy shape of it comes into focus. 

I reviewed this week’s episode of Before for Decider.

One thing I’m realizing is that keeping us guessing like this is an artifact of the show’s running time. An unusual half-hour drama — I don’t think Apple TV+ will be submitting this one for Best Comedy, The Bear–style — it’s also an even more unusual half-hour supernatural mystery thriller. What this means is every thirty minutes or so, it’s got to end on a cliffhanger that raises more questions than it answers to keep us moving through all ten episodes, instead of doing so every sixty minutes or so to move us through the same number of episodes or fewer. 

In other words, writer-creator Sarah Thorp all but designed Before to deny us answers. The mysteries add up one on top of the other until it’s tune in next week, same Before-time, same Before-channel. For a while, anyway, we’re gonna be as in the dark as Eli. 

I reviewed this week’s episode of Before for Decider.

In the meantime, the show is most artistically successful in Eli’s dreams. Whatever else you think of what is going on, and whatever you think of Crystal’s performance (I like it but I don’t feel he’s had the chance to do much nuanced work with this material yet), the man repeatedly dreams of being maimed and killed — by Noah, by Lynn, by himself. That’s the depth of desperation and darkness beneath the surface-level warmth everyone seems drawn to in Eli. I wonder how much Noah and the phenomena surrounding him will drag up to the light.

I reviewed the second episode of Before for Decider.

But the focal point of the episode remains Eli’s attempts to figure out what’s going on with his patient. A harrowing MRI goes awry when the boy hallucinates one of those black-goop tentacle-worm things, a tiny one this time, extruding from the top of the chamber and slithering into his IV wound. I so wish they’d taken the time to use practical effects for an image that inherently squirmy and uncomfortable; the CGI just doesn’t feel viscerally frightening and gross the way it needs to. (Being more creepy than actually scary is a consistent problem for the show.)

I reviewed the second episode of Before for Decider.

Weird kid. Dead wife. Bloody bathtub. Black goop. Creepy tentacles. Recurring nightmares. Scary drawings. Cursed cabin. The series premiere of Before, the new psychological-supernatural thriller from writer-creator Sarah Thorp, feels a little like it went into the horror store and said “I’ll take one of everything.” With nine half-hour-or-so episodes to go after this one, there’s only one question to ask: Will the whole add up to more than the some of its parts?

I reviewed the first episode of the new Billy Crystal/Judith Light supernatural/psychological thriller Before for Decider.

Shelley Duvall had some of the most beautiful eyes in Hollywood history; Bette Davis eyes, Ella Purnell eyes, Emma Stone eyes, Anya Taylor-Joy eyes. Indeed many of her early roles counted on the sex appeal those eyes radiated. But by taking on Wendy Torrance, Duvall showed she was fully aware of her physical instrument’s full range of capabilities. The same eyes that seduced half the male cast of Nashville, say, could also be used to convince an unsuspecting audience that your son was communicating with the spirit world, that your dry-drunk husband had gotten into a spectral bottle and grabbed a weapon to wield against you, that things had gone so wrong that the world itself is bleeding. That’s a special gift, one without which — without Shelley Duvall —  the greatest horror movie ever made would be measurably less great. 

I wrote about Shelley Duvall’s tremendous performance as Wendy Torrance in The Shining for Decider.

As a screen presence, Santiago needs that kind of ammo. He has to hold his own with the “big four” members of the show’s emotional quadrangle, Louis, Lestat [Sam Reid], Claudia and Armand [Assad Zaman], even though he’s not romantically or emotionally involved with any of them.

[Smiling] Is he not?

Well, well, well!

This was one of the first jobs I’ve ever done sight unseen, just because it meant working with Rolin. From the outset, Rolin called up and said, “Listen, are you OK if we don’t make Santiago queer?” I was like, “Yeah, I can sort of see it.”

But as the script started to come in, I thought the only way this level of vitriol that he has works is if he’s in love with Armand. There is this extraordinary psychological term called reaction formation, which is what Iago has for Othello. It’s a defense mechanism whereby your impulses are so unacceptable to your ego that they’re replaced by this opposite, exaggerated behavior.

Santiago finds Louis incredibly attractive. Because Armand killed Santiago’s maker — who I think he was in love with too — and also finds Louis attractive, the whole thing must be destroyed. It gave such a drive to his hatred. It was just something ruminating in myself that drove him forward in a very aggressive, mad, extreme way.

Here’s a gift link to my interview with the magnificent Ben Daniels about his delightful work as Santiago on this season of Interview with the Vampire. He was extremely gracious and generous with his time and emotion, as you’ll see. It’s one of my favorite interviews I’ve ever done.

I’ll note here that Deborah Ayorinde has delivered one of my favorite performances of the year, amid competition that’s already very stiff. The dynamic range of emotional intensity she can convey with the way she holds her eyes, her nose, her mouth alone is astonishing, all the more so for how simple she makes it look. At the drop of a hat she can be a mother driven to reckless anger, an abuse survivor seeing the true story of her young life play out, a doppelgänger embodying only her worst qualities, a horror-movie character watching as a malevolent creature slowly approaches.

I reviewed the finale of Them: The Scare for Decider.

Whatever else it is, the penultimate installment of Them: The Scare is one of the most visually accomplished episodes of television to air this year. Directing a script by Scott Kosar, creator Little Marvin employs a variety of striking visual techniques to create the sense that for Dawn Reeve and her family, the walls are closing in; Marvin makes this all but literal by adjusting the frame to the comparatively claustrophobic dimensions of an old TV screen. 

But limiting the characters’ room to maneuver is just one of Little Marvin’s tricks. He tints the screen blood red for the characters’ nightmarish visions. He breaks out a split diopter shot straight out of classic Hollywood to heighten the painful melodrama between Athena and Dawn. He uses dissolves, overlays, and slowly spinning images to fade us from one image and scene to another in a hypnagogic rhythm. There’s a Vertigo shot, a camera attached to a car door, static horrors placed at the center of the frame in  monumental horror-image style. Why settle for just being scary when you can be scary and gorgeous, too?

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Them: The Scare for Decider.