Well, in this case, the raves and the hype and the passion of the responses is deserved! This is an absolutely remarkable, mind-blowing series the constantly stuns and amazes one – and always for the best of reasons. The basic scenario – a series of fatally eliminatory games for debt-ridden individuals based on childhood games – sounds unsurprising but that is SO far from the whole truth.
The first episode has amazing shock value – particularly if you come to it with absolutely no knowledge – ‘is this really what they’re doing?’ but once having seen it, and having a sense of the basic scenario, I did wonder what they would do to top it. Would the games just get gorier and more violent? Was it going to be essentially a horror series like Saw?
Not so. The greatest strength of this series was that every episode went in a different direction, constantly surprising and involving the viewer and, as it went on, becoming more and more thoughtful and thought-provoking so that towards the end the fatal games almost seemed a side issue. Episode 2 for example was entirely concerned with the back stories of a number of the individuals so that they became rounded, more interesting people with whom it was easier to identify – and it showed how their experiences in the outside world had led them to where they were now. The episode was called In Hell and had the most disturbing pre-credit sequence; a series of coffins (all with a pink ribbon tied round them) being loaded into furnaces. A hand comes out of one of them and one of the masked figures in vivid pink jumpsuits and with fencing-style masks over their faces who administer the games, just pushes it back in a nail-guns the coffin shut. And yet, as the series progressed we realised that the contestants’ lives in the outside world was, in many respects, worse than what they were experiencing in the games. As the administrators said, here they are all equal and everyone is treated as equal with a chance to succeed – so very different from the rigidly stratified and vast financial and social distances between them in the outside world.
As the competitors are whittled down, the alliances and relationships become central to what they have to do in the games and it is that aspect rather than the horror of the actual games that becomes the emotional focus of what we see. The brutal relentlessness of the games, and their administration did give, I thought, an interesting sort of parallel to the way that children, when playing games, can become totally and utterly involved in them, to the exclusion of everything else. Here violent death adjacent to one becomes virtually unnoticeable to the individual who is just concentrating on staying alive.
The visuals of this series also play a very important part in its effectiveness. There is at times an almost Wes Anderson degree of colour –coordination and symmetrical precision framing in many scenes which both distances them from what we are experiencing but also conveys the degree of total control that the administrators and creators of the games have over the participants – perhaps a visual representation of the unseen forces that control the contestants in their lives in the outside world.
A favourite feature was the multi-candy-coloured Escher-style staircase which the contestants used to get from their dormitory (always chillingly containing only the right number of beds once a game had finished). The joyous colours and the music mentioned above gave a horribly seductive air to the whole proceedings in the games area, there was a particular clarity about the images that was not there elsewhere. Not sure how this was achieved – cameras? – but it was very effective and I felt contributed almost subliminally, the power and impact of the scenes – there was no getting away from what was about to happen or was happening. Compare my earlier remark about intense childlike focus.
The use of music was excellent – alternating between sentimental classics like Blue Danube and much more modern electronic sounds to effectively increase tension.
At the end the resolution, such as it was, was very satisfying. But I was particularly interested in one of the last scenes. Did anyone else think that the scene towards the end of the last episode...the central character with the old man in bed...was very reminiscent of the final scene of Fight Club. The location, the lighting, the framing were all strongly redolent of that scene for me. Are there meant to be connections – even to the extent of doubting reality? Connections? Reality? The location/framing/lighting? I’m deliberately a bit cryptic as do not want to drop any spoilers...
So, a tremendous series which, by the end, had extended very impressively from apparently being a mere horror-show game to being something much more thoughtful, profound even, about how we live today and relate to the we have to cope with in society. A wonderful achievement which I very strongly urge you to see.