What is Squid Game up to this time? The clues are in the colours

The Age

17-06-2025

It's the hot-pink uniforms that grab you first. As Squid Game 's faceless guards step out in a trailer for the final season of the hit Korean series, the screen is once again saturated with colour. Dressed in a shade that might even make Barbie squeamish, they're carrying a coffin draped with a large pink bow.
It's enough to send a hush over both colour-coded teams in this fight-to-the-death contest for a mounting pile of cash. Whether you're wearing a red cross for 'stop the slaughter', or a blue circle for 'never mind the body count, I want that money', those pink overalls spell trouble. Soon it'll be time to climb the Escher-style staircases – with their deceptively festive flights of pink, green and blue – that lead back onto a blood-soaked playground.
None of these colours are accidental, of course. Film and television makers know exactly what they're doing when they dip into the cinematic paintbox. Will they play to tradition – yellow means happy, green equals jealousy – or subvert it?
Squid Game 's Hwang Dong-hyuk defies expectations by turning the playful palette of children's games into a vision of hell. The sweet, girly innocence of Barbie's favourite colour might never again be quite so one-dimensional.
Of course, Hwang is not the first director to spin the colour wheel to excess. Since Dorothy first stepped into a technicolour Oz, colour or its absence has been a heavily coded clue. Subliminal or otherwise, some shades just can't keep away from the cameras.
Red
The most commanding of the traffic-light trifecta, red warns of danger ahead. When Steven Spielberg dressed a solitary little girl in red against the monotone grimness of Nazi Europe in Schindler's List, the message was clear: here was life, heart and hope, about to be snuffed out. In the dystopian world of The Handmaid's Tale, red morphs from a state-sanctioned mark of fertility to the fevered cloth of revolution. It's a murderous lure in the 1973 horror mystery Don't Look Now, as grieving father John Baxter follows the wrong red raincoat down the wrong Venetian alleyway. Red reminds Dorothy to click her heels and head home, and lures Agent Dale Cooper to a place beyond reason as he slips between Twin Peaks ' trippy floor-length curtains.
Seeing red in The Sixth Sense brings us spookily close to the spirit world as Malcolm Crowe follows young Cole through a church's bloody-red doors. When Cole's not hiding from dead people inside his makeshift red tent, he's scribbling what they tell him – the messages he calls his 'upset words' – in ominous red ink. Throw in the jumper he wears to that fateful birthday party, the balloon he follows up that spiral staircase and the doorknob that blocks Crowe's place among the living, and you get the picture. This is a colour that even dead people can't ignore.
Blue
It's sombre, it's regal, it's a bit repressed. Blue might cloak female characters in the calming hue of sea and sky, but it's often a signal of trouble underneath. Those snooty commanders' wives in The Handmaid's Tale can swan about all they like in the teal-blue cloak of serenity, but the stain of infertility can't be comfy.
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Kate Winslet's power-drunk chancellor in last year's offbeat political satire The Regime is still reaching for the gold-trimmed power suit, but anyone can see that her world is unravelling. And decorating her office in shades of royal blue won't save Mrs Cobel when the Eagans turn against her in Severance.
A more traditional example of colour-coded symbolism bathes a grief-stricken Juliette Binoche in the melancholy reflections of a beaded mobile in Three Colours Blue. At the other end of the emotional scale, blue points to joy in the hit French romance Amelie; against a Paris dominated by red, green and yellow, those chalked blue arrows lead to happily ever after. Call it a gift from the wide blue yonder.
Yellow
Borrowing dazzle and energy from the sun, yellow shines with light and vitality – just don't get too close. Dorothy might be headed for adventure when she steps onto the yellow brick road, but Uma Thurman's Bride has quite a different destination in mind when she pulls on that canary-coloured biker's suit in Kill Bill. Demi Moore's overcoat in The Substance channels egg-yolk excess that screams 'here's one 50-plus woman who refuses to fade away'. And a terminally ill Tilda Swinton chooses an affirming vibrant yellow when it's time to take her leave in The Room Next Door, Pedro Almodovar's typically colour-saturated meditation on the right to die.
In the distinctive cinematic palette of Wes Anderson, it's the yellow submarine in The Life Aquatic, the suitcase Sam runs away with in Moonrise Kingdom, and the tent to which Margot retreats from her dysfunctional family in The Royal Tenenbaums. Some might call it mellow yellow, but in the language of cinema, it's often anything but.
Green
Being green wasn't easy for Kermit the frog, but compared to Elphaba Thropp, he had nothing to complain about. The green-skinned half of Wicked 's power duo is a picture of adolescent isolation, a weird-looking antithesis to the sparkly Glinda. Green as a signal of something less than human can land on either side of the personality spectrum. For every Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle fighting crime in New York, or pseudo-ogre with a Shrek-sized heart of gold, there's a misanthropic Grinch taking aim at Christmas.
Alfred Hitchcock mines the sinister power of green in his 1958 psychological thriller Vertigo. The deceitful Madeline wears shimmering emerald green to ensnare the hapless Scottie, before leading him on a merry chase in her bottle-green Jag. Later, she'll be lit with the neon glow of jealousy when she realises her deception has worked a little too well. Looks like that traffic light has just flipped to red.
Purple
Every feminist knows that purple packs a punch. The colour long associated with change and strength was an obvious choice for Emmeline Pankhurst's suffragettes and its message resonates in The Colour Purple as a symbol of female resilience. Being a rarity in nature, it can also hint at otherworldly mystery: the purple lighting in Blade Runner 2049 adds to the film's dystopian unease, while Wakanda's Black Panther takes on a spooky glow when he's absorbing energy.
A more nostalgic hint of elegance and luxury lets the purple-clad staff of The Grand Budapest Hotel keep up appearances as chaos takes hold. The colour's association with arrogance and immaturity spells trouble for the aptly named Violet Beauregarde when the grabbiest young visitor to Willie Wonka's chocolate factory turns into an oversized blueberry. Just as impervious to the dangers of excess, the violet-haired Thanos from Squid Game season 2 takes his name from Marvel's lilac-skinned villain. Amid fevered online speculation about whether the pill-popping punk will be back for season 3, it's worth remembering that his namesake was decapitated in 2019's Avengers: Endgame. Even when they're cloaked in the colour of power and ambition, villains are apt to get it in the neck.