'Alice in Borderland' started life as a manga, and has graduated to a Netflix TV series (still in Japanese). The main characters are Kento Yamazaki as Ryōhei Arisu (as close as you can get to "Alice" in the Japanese language), and Tao Tsuchiya as Yuzuha Usagi. The series focuses first on Arisu, who with his two best friends is essentially transported from a restroom in the teaming Shibuya crossing area of Tokyo to an alternate, completely abandoned Tokyo. They soon find out that it's not totally abandoned - and the only way to survive is to play "games" every few nights. Comparisons have been made to "Battle Royale" and "Cube," neither of which I've seen - but it sounds about right from what I know of them. The first season consists of eight episodes of about 45 minutes each. This review is based on the first five episodes.

It's both dark and violent. I've never been a fan of horror movies or TV - and particularly not during the pandemic. Horror-comedy occasionally: this has no comedy. If you want to see society and civility break down completely (yeah, I get this is kind of the point) as people are forced to kill each other to survive ... this is fairly well done, if you can get with the magical premise. Not my thing.