When South Korean filmmaker Hwang Dong-Hyuk created the original Squid Game, a drama, he intended his dystopian tale of down-on-their-luck game contestants risking death for a huge cash prize to highlight the iniquities of global capitalism.
After all, Dong-Hyuk and his family had been in debt themselves and he wanted to explore how our most venal and calculating instincts can come to the fore when forced to compete in order to survive. In 2021, with the world in the grip of the Covid-19 pandemic, all this struck a chord and Squid Game became Netflix’s most successful series ever.
