Four hundred fifty-six people are recruited and subjected to a humiliating preliminary test: they are more or less desperate individuals due to economic issues.

The goal is to subject them to six survival games, losing which means death; the prize is 45.6 billion won, or about 33/34 million euros: only one winner and therefore only one survivor is expected.

Each has their own story—professional, family, political, social—that places them in an extreme living condition.

The initial unawareness of the risk they are subjected to will meet, after the first game, the possibility of voting democratically to leave the game.

After the vote, which sees the majority choose to abdicate and return to their previous lives, all will decide to re-enter the game, now aware of the fate they will face.

The renunciation of physical rights, the illegal trade of organs, a cruel war among the poor for the "god of money" hanging in a plexiglass sphere. A compelling, obsessive, ironic soundtrack accompanies the episodes, while Strauss's waltz "The Blue Danube" marks the intro to the now cruelly deadly children's games.

The music, already used in "2001: A Space Odyssey," is one of the first tributes that the Korean director pays to Stanley Kubrick, along with the presence of those masks that rich and bored VIPs wear to remain anonymous, as in Eyes Wide Shut.

The symbolism of

"Circle–triangle–square: this is how Sengai paints the universe. The circle represents infinity, which is the foundation of all beings. But infinity itself has no form. And man, endowed with sensory and intellectual faculties, needs tangible forms: hence the triangle, the origin of all forms, first among them the square. The square is a double triangle, and this duplication process goes on infinitely, giving rise to the multitude of things defined by Chinese philosophers as 'the ten thousand things,' that is, the universe. […]

Of these three figures, or forms, another more traditional interpretation can be given. Sengai was familiar with both Shingon, the Buddhist sect that uses mantras, and Zen. He appreciated Shingon because it taught the identity of bodily experience (rupakaya) and ultimate reality (dharmakaya). The former is represented here by a triangle, symbolizing the human body in its three aspects: physical, linguistic (or intellectual), and mental (or spiritual). The square represents the objective world made up of the four fundamental elements (mahabhuta): earth, water, fire, and air. The dharmakaya, the ultimate reality, is the circle, the formless form. Generally, we have a dichotomous view of existence—form (rupakaya) and formlessness (arupa), object and subject, matter and spirit—and we consider these terms to be contradictory and mutually exclusive. Both Shingon and Zen, however, oppose this view, asserting that form and formlessness, or emptiness (sunya), coincide."

Director Hwang Dong-hyuk explained that he was inspired by ants, which have a work hierarchy where each knows what to do and performs it as part of a whole, to serve the queen (who in this case is the mind behind the organization and the game): "The circle symbol represents the workers, the triangle symbolizes the army, while the rectangle is for the managers."

Other interpretations and explanations can be identified through the symbolism present from the first images of the series; whatever the real one may be, one cannot ignore the attempt to identify which is the most pertinent, as the circle-triangle-square symbolism is obsessively represented.

If for ants the managers are represented by the rectangle and the workers by the circle, while the triangle frames the army, there is no symbol representing the multitude of recruits to the game who are mere functionaries of a system that makes them cannon fodder or, at best, transplant material.

These bodies subjected to the six programmed games are simply pawns on a chessboard, invisible to any human interpretation. Their existence is a pitiful piece to be selected or eliminated to make room for the game on the lives of those who play that life. The alienated and alienating entertainment of existential boredom due to an excess of luxury and poorly distributed wealth.

This Korean-produced mini K-drama is sophisticated and cynical, especially when it emphasizes the theme of "equality" that wants all participants to be put on the same level.

The VIPs are American and wear animal masks, gold-colored, while their bodies are overabundant with flesh and lust, managed in turn by a Deus ex machina who plays humanity with a single, inflexible, purposeless master.

Playing the game of life as a sort of voluntary and non-discriminatory servitude, as the only possibility is to remain within the system: the best way is Divide et Impera, programmed by destroying any space for solidarity, friendship, pity, sisterhood, brotherhood.

A TV series far from dystopian, represented like a video game, depicting a reality so authentic and concretely farcical at the edge of objectivity and awareness.

Who is more servant and who is more master remains to be interpreted; morality is either amoral or not foreseen; ethics (now pat-hetic) is a perfect stranger, while the paradox and scandal of such a real reality require Faith, Kierkegaard would say, not in an omnipotent and eternal God but in a system, that of TECHNIQUE, Heidegger would add, that works and that's it.

23-Jun-2023 by Beatrice