sustain:if:able kiwi

squid game – a theological film review

I sent off a film review (The Power of the Dog) to Touchstone magazine today. In 2005, the editor rang and asked me to theologically review a film of interest to their readers. 500 words please. And offered to pay! The editor liked the review so much, he asked again next month.

It’s now my 15th year of film reviewing. 11 reviews a year. 500 words a film review. Now over 82,000 words! Writing to a deadline month by month has been such a wonderful challenge. Viewing a film theologically, yet needing to be respectful of the art. This month, it was the realisation that the title – The Power of the Dog – was a quote from Scripture (Psalm 22:20). Last month, with Squid Game, a co-written review with my daughter, pondering the harrowing of hell …

Squid Game
Reviewed by Kayli Taylor and Steve Taylor

Squid Game is a survival drama television series streaming on Netflix. Hundreds of cash-strapped contestants compete in children’s games for a winner take all prize. Yet, the stakes are deadly. Directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk, set in South Korea, it has become a Netflix sensation. Rated R16, it is a dark and compelling mediation on contemporary life.

Central to Squid Game are children’s games. Episode 1 centres around Red Light, Green Light, also known as Statues. Participants run on the call of “Green Light” and must freeze on the call of “Red Light.” Any movement during “Red Light” results in elimination. At this point, the story shifts, and it becomes evident that in Squid Game, this children’s game involves real-life survival.

Children’s games should evoke the sounds of gentle laughter. In Squid Game, they illuminate the worst qualities of human character, holding a mirror on the desperation that results from lack of choice.

The lack of choice is brilliantly depicted. Participants begin each game by walking through a hallway of staircases. Painted in pink, yellow and green, it is similar to Dutch artist M. C. Escher’s famed Relativity. At first glance, Escher’s woodcut suggests an idyllic community in which participants enjoy life. Yet all the figures are featureless and identical in dress. The seven staircases are positioned in ways that evoke feelings of being trapped. None of the figures can move freely or escape the image.

The participants in Squid Game are similarly featureless and trapped. They are numbered, not named. Each has been selected based on an assessment of their debt. Yet each number is a person.

Episode 2, intriguingly titled “Hell,” shines a light on the lives of individual numbers. The main character, 456 (played by Lee Jung-jae) is a man caught in a gambling addiction. Number 199 (played by Anupam Tripathi) is a Pakistani migrant caught in an exploitive working environment. Number 067 (played by HoYeon Jung) is desperately trying to reconnect with her family stuck in North Korea – a reunion that comes with heavy costs. Hell exists in the here and now as the circumstances of life’s realities and the consequences of desperate choices play out in human relationships.

A masked man controls Squid Game, watching the carnage from a distance. The notion of an omnipotent being, usually male, controlling the game played by lesser mortals is a familiar image of the Christian God.

Where is God in Squid Game? Christian theology argues that in Jesus, God refuses to watch from a distance. Instead, God gambles by entering the game of life. Christ becomes a number, participating to repay the debts of those trapped by their human choices. An unknown fourth-century sermon describes the events of Easter as God being “swallowed” by Hades. This swallowing occurs so that Christ might search the very depths of human hell. Could God take the number of another human player inside the game of life, even to death?

Kayli Taylor is a Masters student at the University of Otago and researches queer feminist social histories.

Rev Dr Steve Taylor is author of “First Expressions” (2019) and Director AngelWings Ltd, resourcing churches in mission.