Lee Chang-keun found “Squid Game,” a gruesome Netflix survival thriller about desperate adults playing in fatal children’s games for a chance to get out of debt, a little too close to home.
Since its September premiere, the program has enthralled global audiences on its path to becoming Netflix’s biggest hit ever. It has ruffled feathers at home, where people are growing dissatisfied with rising personal debt, deteriorating job markets, and widening economic disparities exacerbated by financial crises over the last two decades.
Lee sees a reflection of himself in Seong Gi-hun, a laid-off autoworker surviving with a broken family and struggling with frequent business failures and gambling problems, in the dystopian horrors of “Squid Game.”
Seong is forced by mafia creditors into signing over his organs as collateral, but then he receives a mystery offer to participate in a series of six traditional Korean children’s games for a chance to win $38 million.
Seong is pitted against hundreds of other financially troubled competitors in a hyper-violent race for the ultimate reward, with losers being killed at every round on the South Korean-produced show.