While foreigners primarily know the South Korean entertainment industry for its prolific churn of upbeat, mass-produced K-Pop, a handful of Korean films and television series have also garnered international attention in recent years. The country’s cinematic exports skew much darker, dealing directly and allegorically with the grim realities of life under capitalism in Korea.

The latest entry in this genre is Netflix’s dystopian survival drama Squid Game, which is on track to become the platform’s most-watched series of all time. Like Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning 2019 film Parasite and the 2020 Netflix K-drama Extracurricular, Squid Game reflects rising discontent with Korean socioeconomic inequality.

Dubbed one of the four “Asian Tigers,” the South Korean economy has experienced tremendous changes in the last sixty years after undergoing rapid industrialization in the aftermath of the Korean War. In 1960, South Korea’s per capita income of $82 placed it behind a long list of economically exploited and impoverished countries, including Ghana, Senegal, Zambia, and Honduras. It wasn’t until dictator Park Chung-hee came to power in 1961 that Korea began to experience tremendous economic growth. Known as the “Miracle on the River Han,” South Korea developed from a low-income country to one of the leading economies in the world in the span of a few decades.