Contains spoilers for “Squid Game” Season 3

Motherhood can be a complicated thing, as Kim Jun-hee (Jo Yu-ri) learns during her brief time with her unnamed daughter in “Squid Game” Season 3. Fortunately, when she goes into labor during the second game, she has loving mom figure Jang Geum-ja (Kang Ae-sim) there. Geum-ja delivers the baby with Hyun-ju (Park Sung-hoon) watching, and all is well — at least, as well as things can be in such circumstances.

Geum-ja is so devoted to the health of the baby that she actually kills her own son when he threatens to murder it to win the key and blade game. That leads to Geum-ja’s suicide in the dorms later, and ultimately to Jun-hee’s decision to sacrifice herself to ensure her daughter’s future during the jump rope game. She knows that her injured ankle will make a safe crossing practically impossible, so she makes the ultimate sacrifice for her daughter. 

All of this is beautiful and tragic, but it’s hard to get lost in the scenes involving the baby when it’s painfully obvious that the child has been at least partially rendered with CGI. While some shots of the little girl are passable, several close-ups definitely betray the fact that they pasted some child’s face over a dummy. It makes scenes that should be hard-hitting kind of awkward, distracting from one of Season 3’s most impactful storylines.

If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat 988lifeline.org

While it’s understandable that they would use a fake or CGI baby during the birth because of the dangerous situation in which it happens and the long hours on set required to complete such a scene, it’s harder to get your head around the fact that they used CGI for simple shots. The close-ups of the child in Episode 3, Episode 4, and Episode 5 are quite clearly CGI. There’s no real reason for this — using an actual baby here would have been straightforward and beneficial to the overall viewing experience.

Pasting a CGI face on what appears to be a doll causes an uncanny valley effect in several shots. And let’s not get into the oddly artificial way the baby moves, making it look like a rubber chicken in a comedy act. It’s not as annoying as the many plot holes in “Squid Game,” but it’s still very distracting. Just like the infamous CGI baby in “Twilight: Breaking Dawn,” it takes viewers out of the story at vital moments, especially in scenes like Kim Jun-hee’s suicide, where the baby is seen crying alone in a flowerbox after she has been rescued.

There are a few reasons why “Squid Game” producers might have chosen to use a fake baby instead of a real one. The first is to do with on-set hazards. For example, one “Squid Game” Season 2 scene actually made the actors sick: The six-legged pentathlon game. “Every time one group did a run around, [the set] was completely filled with dust, and it was hard to breathe,” Front Man actor Lee Byung-hun told TheWrap. This was confirmed by writer-director-creator Hwang Dong-hyuk, who added, “Everyone got really sick. As soon as I said ‘Cut,’ everyone started coughing, including me. It took more than two weeks to shoot the scene.” These are clearly not the kind of conditions a baby should be working in. 

Another potential reason for using a CGI baby instead of a real one is South Korea’s child labor laws, which have been the subject of much discussion in recent years. The current rules state that nobody under the age of 15 can work for more than 35 hours a week, and the laws on younger children working could well be tightened up in the near future. In February 2025, a new law was proposed that would limit those under nine to working 30 hours per week, with a maximum of 6 hours per day. When it comes to shooting a huge TV show like “Squid Game,” the CGI route is simply the safest one, regardless of how awkward it looks.