In the Polish series CRACOW MONSTERS, a medical student joins a group of supernaturally gifted students working with a mysterious professor to investigate demonology. A work of dark urban fantasy with strong roots in Polish mythology, the series follows genre conventions while serving up something that feels unconventional, gritty, and lived in. I liked this one a lot, it’s a lot of fun.

In the first episode, we meet Alex, starting her first year at medical school in the city of Cracow. The sole survivor of several tragedies, haunted by the death of her mother and horrific night terrors, she worries she will go insane like her mother and distracts herself with partying and sex. (Ah, to be young again, when you can party hard all night and then go to class the next morning with a giant cup of coffee feeling a little worse for wear but ready to go.) When she’s invited by a brilliant professor to an internship with his group of gifted students, she enters a world where Polish mythology is real. And she learns she is at the center of it.

There’s a lot to like here. Cracow is wonderfully gritty, its locations offering a distinctly European mix of hip and modern with old and even ancient. The characters are basically angsty hipsters, but they’re believable, and they’re interesting as a team. The monsters are terrific–a pair of twins who are succubi, a monstrous version of Krampus/Santa Claus, and so on–all controlled by a malevolent spirit who may not be a demon but instead a god. The plot rolls out as a simple dark urban fantasy but with just enough complexity that it comes together. The Polish lore is great.

All’s not perfect, as it rarely is. The pacing may be a little slow for some, at least in the early episodes (I personally didn’t mind the slow build). Alex is difficult nearly to the point of being unlikable, though that’s a common reaction for me watching something with a strong dash of YA in it. Her battles with various monsters roll out without much tension, they seem to resolve easily and in a scripted manner. And as is common with TV shows where the writers want to keep a sense of mystery going, characters argue, avoid talking, or “cease to exist” due to a cutaway when a simple conversation would fix things. Also common, the arch villain talks about how he’s going to kill the protagonist instead of easily doing it. A number of smaller plot questions were punted to Season 2.

But no matter. Though the Neil Gaiman style of urban fantasy isn’t my usual thing, I liked this one a lot, and there’s plenty on the table for a second season if it earns it. Recommended if you’re looking for fresh, offbeat, and highly immersive dark fantasy.

In ELVES (Netflix), a Danish family vacations on an island that harbors a deadly secret. I ended up fairly torn by this one, as it’s an interesting story surprisingly well told, though the story it tells becomes insanely frustrating. Let me explain. Note this review is a bit spoilerly.

The family–Mom, Dad and their teenage children Kasper and Josefine–venture to a remote island, where they rented a house to spend Christmas. The locals aren’t exactly welcoming and warn them to avoid the inland road and to respect the natural environment. Of course, the family does neither, running over something on the road near an electrified fence. Angry at Mom for not allowing her to have a pet, Josefine bikes back to the spot from their cabin, discovers a wounded creature, and brings it to a barn near her family’s cabin, where she nurses it back to health.

Beyond the fence, the creatures are not happy about this, and horror ensues.

The elves themselves are fairly well done, though I found them scarier by what they did off camera than what they did on. The acting is pretty good, and the family dynamics and tension with the locals feels lived in and engaging. The horror element is fine. There is an environmental message about sustainability that is solid.

The main problem is Josefine makes maddeningly frustrating choices. It’s almost like she’s in a personal remake of Spielberg’s ET while everybody else is in a horror film. She’s a child, yes, and made a terrible mistake despite repeated warnings. Once people start getting killed, she’s confronted with the consequences of her choices, and for a short time she appears to acknowledge responsibility. But instead of changing and maturing and trying to make things right, she keeps stubbornly doubling down on the mistake regardless of the consequences, and at the end, the only regret she seems to have is she couldn’t keep her pet. This threw the entire story out of whack for me. This could have been a story about losing innocence and growing up the hard way, but instead the story winds up fighting this own message with an opposing message: Don’t grow up, act like a privileged human wrecking ball, and the grownups will take care of it.

This series has taken a lot of flak from reviewers primarily for this reason. I didn’t hate it. It has a lot of great qualities, and overall, I enjoyed it. But be warned, if you watch it, you might end up rooting for the elves.

In SQUID GAME (Netflix, Korean), a group of financially desperate people are recruited to participate in a series of games for a cash prize worth billions. I absolutely loved this gripping, violent, and emotionally devastating show, with a few reservations.

The first episode introduces us to Seong Gi-hun, a divorced chauffeur heavily in debt, who dips into his mother’s savings to gamble. In the opening, we see him as a boy playing a children’s game called the Squid Game, how when he won he felt on top of the world. Years later, he’s not as good at the game of life and gambles to get above water financially and hopefully reclaim that feeling of winning from long ago. True to the best South Korean films, we have a protagonist who is a heavily flawed loser but also eminently relatable and likeable.

When a mysterious organization invites him to participate in various games for cash prizes, he volunteers. Suddenly, he’s competing along with 455 other people in a series of children’s games. It looks like fun, only the trick is the losers die, and with each death, the cash prize for the winners goes up. The games break them down into smaller groups until it’s basically every person for themselves, and they realize they’re not only betting their lives, they’re selling their souls and very humanity, showing what they’re all truly made of. Along the way, we meet and sympathize with other terrific characters, each with their own personal reason for competing, making this their story as much as Seong Gi-hun’s.

The show has been compared to ALICE IN BORDERLAND, a similar Japanese series, but I personally found SQUID GAME far superior and more compelling, as it goes far deeper into character and theme, which invested me so much more heavily such that I found it emotionally devastating while I found ALICE only titillating. The games are just brutal, absolutely riveting stuff, and the stakes are devastating, with plenty of physical challenges and psychological twists. The sets and costumes in the game world are terrific. The theme is pretty simple: Capitalism brutalizes people, resulting in a boredom among the rich and a desperation among the poor uniting them in psychopathy.

I had two criticisms. One is that a side plot produces a terrific perspective on what’s going on but doesn’t really go anywhere except possibly to influence the events in a second season. The second is the ending, which I found pretty disappointing as it chose a resolution that didn’t resonate with me.

Overall, SQUID GAME is just great storytelling: people you care about challenged and absolutely brutalized by games with the highest stakes–your life and more money you could spend in a lifetime.