Movies To Watch If You Can't Get Enough Squid Game

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It's no surprise that "Squid Game" has become such a massive global phenomenon on Netflix. The South Korean survival series from Hwang Dong-hyuk is an utter thrill, filled with compelling characters, twisted games, and clever commentary on society and class structure. Throughout the can't-stop show, audiences get to watch as the 456 debt-riddled contestants volunteer for an opportunity to play for a fortune but are then subjected to deadly versions of common children's games and slowly picked off — sometimes even by each other.

If you're one of the millions of people who've become instantly obsessed with "Squid Game," you may be looking for some more of that thrilling dystopian action after you finish the series. The good news is that not only are there additional survival game-style shows like "Alice in Borderland" and "3%" that make for excellent companions to "Squid Game," but there are also a bounty of films available on Netflix right now that can satisfy your hankering for more. Here's a look at some movies you can watch next if you can't get enough of "Squid Game."

Just as the contestants in "Squid Game" arise to find themselves competing in a mysteriously lethal game, the characters in "Circle" also have quite an alarming wakeup call. In the film, 50 different people come to and discover that they're trapped in a circle, with a relentless killing machine at the center of the room. They soon learn that the device will rapidly execute one of them every two minutes, and it will choose these victims at random if the group doesn't come to a consensus on the next target.

With no chance of stopping the game or reasoning with their robotic gamemaster, the unwitting players have to convince the crowd of strangers why they deserve to be spared instead of the others. Just as "Squid Game" reveals both the dark lengths to which a person can go to save their own skin and the heroic sacrifices others will make while facing the same circumstances, "Circle" has an intriguing sociological bend that makes the terrifying bloodsport at the center of the story even more gripping to watch.

Another film that digs into what people are willing to do under incomprehensible duress is the Spanish-language thriller "The Platform." Much like Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) has his reasons for wanting to enter and then reenter the strange contest in "Squid Game," the protagonist in "The Platform," Goreng (Iván Massagué), also volunteers to spend six months in a prison facility with certain expectations that it will be to his own benefit. However, what he experiences once inside the Pit is much ghastlier than anything he could've possibly anticipated.

Goreng wakes up to find himself locked in a concrete cell with another man, Trimagasi (Zorion Eguileor), who's been in captivity for some time and explains the rules of the place. Each day, a single platform of food drops from level to level for a brief period of time for people to eat from. It's a bountiful feast for those at the top levels, but it's a struggle against starvation for those on the lower levels, and these poor souls must resort to unspeakable violence to survive. 

Making matters worse is that every month, the prisoners are moved up and down the ladder of levels, meaning many of those at the top know from experience what gorging themselves will do to the people below. In addition to being a horrifying, claustrophobic, and often gross reality, the Pit is also a disturbing social experiment, which means the film is both entertaining and elucidating, just like "Squid Game."

When it comes to wicked cinematic experiments, not all participants are volunteers, and that's certainly the case in "Tau." The film follows a young woman named Julia (Maika Monroe) after she's abducted and held captive in the high-tech house of a ruthless scientist named Alex (Ed Skrein). In addition to psychologically torturing her, Alex forces Julia to complete certain tasks so that he can collect certain cerebral data from an implant in her neck for his artificial intelligence research.

Julia soon learns that she's not the only victim of Alex's cruel games, and the entire house is controlled by an AI named Tau (voiced by Gary Oldman) that doesn't yet understand the nuances of the human condition and the danger Alex poses to Julia and his other prisoners. As Julia grapples with her captor, she also struggles to deal with this powerful digital guard. Tau might not exactly look like the "Red Light, Green Light" robot doll, but the threat level is pretty high with this all-seeing AI lurking around.

Bong Joon Ho's 2013 adaptation of "Snowpiercer" is also an intense thrill ride that methodically paints a grim picture of classicism run amok. The film takes place in a not-too-distant future in which the world has frozen over as a result of a climate change repair gone wrong, and the only people who survive amid the wintry hellscape are the passengers of a globe-circling mega-train called — you guessed it — Snowpiercer.

This train was designed to withstand extreme temperatures, plow through glaciers, and is equipped with all of the comforts and resources its inhabitants could possibly need in a meticulously crafted and closed ecosystem. The trouble is, Snowpiercer was built by and for the world's wealthiest few, so when a group of unticketed commoners manage to sneak in before the world's end, they're relegated to the back of the train to exist in squalor and starvation. Even their children are stolen from them. 

After years of mistreatment by this lop-sided system, people in the tail of the train finally decide to fight back and force their way to the front. And the struggle they face is only half as brutal as the truth that's ultimately revealed about how this fragile system really functions. Just as "Squid Game" is both a rush and a reality check, "Snowpiercer" is a similarly stunning piece of cinema.

One of the most unnerving aspects of "Squid Game" is how the show manages to turn otherwise innocent children's games into methods of massacre. From team tug-of-war to one-on-one marble matches, the series gives some terrifying twists to games that used to be flights of fancy for many audience members. Similarly, the 2017 horror film "Truth or Dare" might make you hesitate to strike up another round of the titular contest with your buddies any time soon.

The film centers on a group of friends who decide to spend their Halloween night celebration together in a house that's supposedly haunted after being the site of a deadly game of "Truth or Dare" decades before. As if being there isn't brazen enough, they also decide to engage in the same game and soon find out why their predecessors met such unfortunate ends. A mysterious presence uses electronics to deliver instructions to the group, forcing them to play the increasingly horrific game one terrifying task at a time.

If you're ever stranded in a remote locale thanks to car trouble, see an ad for a nearby escape room, and have a diner waitress ominously say you shouldn't go there before nervously laughing off her own little warning, word to the wise: Take the lady's initial advice and steer clear. Unfortunately for the central characters in "No Escape Room," a father and daughter duo with a strained relationship on a road trip, they believe her when she says that they'll have a "hell of a time" if they go. And, well, she's not exactly wrong about that.

Escape rooms are usually designed to feel a little too real, and getting a bit of a rush out of the creeping sense of dread and entrapment is part of the excitement. But just as "Squid Game" took some ordinarily harmless pastimes and transformed them into something sinister, the eponymous locale in "No Escape Room" is also beset with very real dangers. And as the characters begin to realize that what they're experiencing is not ordinary gameplay but instead deeply dangerous and disturbing, they also realize that it may be too late for them to find a way out of the hellish maze they've thrown themselves in.

One of the most jaw-dropping moments in "Squid Game" comes when we finally get to meet those much-fussed VIPs and discover just how much sick pleasure they derive from watching the games unfold. That shock is then amplified when we find out that the reason the games were even created in the first place was that a bunch of wealthy folks got bored with their ultra-privileged lives and wanted to spice things up with some simulated death matches involving cash-strapped people who'd risk it all for a fortune.

As horrifying as the haves-versus-have nots element is in "Squid Game," things are even more unsettling in "Level 16." This dystopian sci-fi thriller takes audiences to a school that's ostensibly built to bring girls up from birth to become perfect young ladies who are ideal for adoption when they rise from Level 0 at infancy to the final level at the age of 16. However, not all of the girls are convinced that when they reach the ultimate Level 16, they'll simply move on to a new happy home life with folks outside of the facility, and as they desperately search for the truth behind this cryptic institution, they make some devastating discoveries indeed.