Seong Gi-hun's (Lee Jung-jae) life is anything but a success story, he hasn't held a regular job in 10 years, all businesses that he has started have failed, his wife (Kang Mal-Geum) has left him, he had to move back in with his mother (Kim Young-ok), he's in heavy debt and now he scrambles to at least buy his daughter (Jo Ah-in) a present and dinner for her birthday - money he "earns" at a last ditch effort at the race track, but soon enough runs into pickpocket Kang Sae-byeok (Hoyeon) who relieves him of his wins ... only to then run into a loan shark (Kim Pub-lae) he's so heavy in debt with so he makes Gi-hun sign over his kidney for organ donation. However, when at his worst he meets a man (Gong Yoo) at the subway who challenges him to a simple game offering him good money every time he wins but a slap across the face every time he loses. Gi-hun is quickly game for this and leaves with quite an amount of money but his face black and blue. He's also offered to make even more money, a fortune in fact, playing a series of six games, and seeing it a way out of his misery he quickly agrees - and it's not long before he's shipped off to a secret location with 455 other players, all down-on-their-luck people from dementia-plagued Oh Il-nam (Oh Yeong-so) to small-fry gangster Jang Deok-su (Heo Sung-tae) to the very pickpocket who got him into his mess, Kang Sae-byeok, to Cho Sang-woo (Park Hae-soo), an old friend of his who has hidden his crippling debts behind a facade of makebelief success. And suddenly, all players find themselves in an arena to play "red light, green light", with a giant doll overseeing the proceedings, equipped with motion sensors - and shooting dead everybody who moves when not supposed to. So what looked like a simple childhood game turns out to be a matter of life and death ...

Surprisingly enough, this series from South Korea which was frequently dubbed as ultra-violent, has quickly become a worldwide TV sensation, and in this first episode it's already easy to see why, as it mixes the seeming straight-forwardedness of its basic plot with splashes of surrealism, thriller-like filmmaking tactics, spots of dystopia, strong threads of media-satire, and is carried by a character easy to identify with as Seong Gi-hun is a fallible yet likeable loser, and however over-the-top the plot might be, he successfully grounds the proceedings, making all the excesses of the plot palpable - and the result is a pretty entertaining watch, where the spots of ultra-violence are more than balanced by unusual but stringent storytelling.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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