WHAT is left from the pornography of sadism? In the case of Squid Game, the answer is nothing. Or it is vaguely there at most. At the end of the final episode of the first season, after everyone had died horribly, director Hwang Dong-hyuk failed to answer his own question: What is the point of the 460-minute death spectacle?

The barbarism on display has been shocking since the very first episode. More than 460 financially desperate people w