The second season of Squid Game: a deadly competition on the carousel

The Creator of Squid Game Hwang Dong-Hyukstill remembers having played Mingle, a courtyard game in which competitors must form groups based on numbers that are called. If you stay without a group, you are out. In the memories of Hwang, at the end of a game he remained, his best friend and another boy. At that point the “two” was called. “If the two of us had simply embraced us, it would have ended there,” he says. “Instead, somehow we began to quarrel for the boy, and we clung to his arm trying to form a couple.”

Hwang immediately understood that he would include Mingle in the second season of his successful series Squid Game. The game has a very strong intrinsic tension, which increases considerably if the consequence of the defeat is death. “Mingle is a game that sometimes forces you to team up, which implies solidarity, but other times it also obliges you to abandon people,” he told Vanity Fair through a translator. «So it has both faces. It speaks of unity, but also of division between people ».

In the sixth episode of the season, the surviving players enter a room and find a firm from the Luna Park, with a huge rotating platform in the center. When music is interrupted, a number is called. The investigating magazines have to hurry to form groups of that number, run in one of the small rooms around the carousel and close the door. If a player remains without a group, he is killed. (Look at the clip below).

It is a dramatic game, made even more intense by interpersonal conflicts that explode among the characters, in particular between Geum-Ja (Kang Ae-Sim) and Yong-Sik (Yang Dong-Geun), mother and son who are separated in one of the most heartbreaking scenes of the season. Hwang and his team, which included the scenographer Chae Kyoung-Sun and the director of photography Kim Ji-Yongthey created Mingle without the use of computer graphics, so that the emotional moments were as realistic as possible. “This scene was particularly demanding because it involved many people,” says Hwang. “There was a very intense action, but also a strong emotional trauma to be transmitted”.

The Mingle scene was shot in the largest pose theater in Korea, the Daejeon Studio Cube. Hwang wanted the set to be welcoming and bright; Chae was inspired by the design of families for families, in particular to the rides. “It’s a sort of very fantastic carnival, but there is a massacre in progress,” he says.

He has included equestrian motifs in design, integrating square, circular and triangular symbols typical of the series. The platform really went around and could support hundreds of actors, until she broke and stopped working if someone went up above it. To solve the problem, the troupe started it empty, then the actors went up to the beginning of the scene. Sometimes, this meant hundreds of people to climb at the same time. “So this scene was difficult to shoot even before calling” action “, and even more later,” admits Hwang.

When playing Mingle In a playground, the participants embrace simply to show which group they belong to. But Hwang and Chae have thought that forcing the characters to lock themselves in designated rooms would have further increased the tension. “Since there is a distance between the platform and the rooms, it can create more drama,” explains Hwang. “And when they close behind those colored doors, in each of those rooms a story can take place.” They added a crack in each door, so that the players inside could see those who remained outside that they were killed.

Chae adds that the lighting was fundamental for the design of the main room. He illuminated the space with 3,000 independent bulbs. «When people set foot on the set, they remained affected by beauty. I think this is partly due to the bright and sparkling lights that had hung, “says Chae. Once the game started, Kim used stroboscopic lighting to increase chaos feeling in the room. “We have 200 or more people in the background, and not everyone is professional actors, so this helped us to hide some details,” says Kim. “But for the actors in the foreground, he enhanced the moment of total chaos.”

Kim almost felt a player too, running together with the actors to capture the most intense close -ups of their terrified faces. His work shines at the crucial moment in which Geum-Ja and Yong-Sik are separated. For Hwang, that scene was all focused on grasping the conflicting emotions of the two characters. «Geum-ja is the incarnation of the traditional Korean mother, who lives only for her son. He’s all for her, “he explains. «When Yong-Sik is dragged away by the two men, she tries relief because he will survive. But at the same time, he wonders if he is not abandoning it. I wanted to show that inner conflict that the Introduction at that moment ».

Initially, Kang Ae-Sim reveals that a joke was foreseen in the scene in which his character told the son to leave. In the end, however, it was eliminated, because it did not fully make the conflicting feelings of Geum-Ja. “I think my character struggled to fully understand what was happening at that moment,” explains the actress. “Try relief to the idea that his son can survive, but he is also terrified because he could die”.

For a moment, it seems that Geum-Ja may die because it cannot form a new group of three. Then gi-hun (Lee Jung-Jae) and Hwang in-Ho (Lee byung-hun) They take it in their team. Once safe in the room, Geum-Ja vehemently defends the actions of the son, claiming that he has not abandoned him on purpose.

Kang does not interpret this moment as an attempt by his character to misrepresent the truth. On the contrary, he is looking for his way to survive. “I don’t think he was lying,” he says. “He is genuinely convinced that his son is a good person and he didn’t want others to speak badly about him.”