What a view | Netflix’s Futmalls.com: online store of goods from the future - be careful what you wish for
- A dark web shop selling goods from decades in the future warps present-day events
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We all know ordering online can throw up booby traps. Who hasn’t been caught out by the occasional indiscreet delivery exposing their hitherto unsuspected “adventurous” side?
It’s all very well returning to sender the items you’ve realised could bring lasting shame if discovered: DIY appendage extensions; signed photos of Manchester United footballers. But what if online purchases could fundamentally change the future – and not positively?
That’s the unwritten guarantee that comes with the goods featured in Taiwanese thriller Futmalls.com (Netflix; series one now available), in which a largely untraceable, dark-web depository of the same name supplies items, some from decades into the future, that can warp the course of present-day events. Crime with sci-fi characteristics can be made to pay, but not as one might expect.
Bestselling novelist Bai Yong-li (played by Allison Lin) discovers this to her horror in the opening, three-part mystery, in which she takes a short cut to affluence and adoration. Having stolen another writer’s prospects to glorify herself, she will, in morality-tale fashion, pay the price later, when an unexpected bill falls due.
Inventively keeping the viewer off-balance as clues linking separate stories emerge, the series creeps into increasingly sinister territory. Dangers deepen, plots thicken and psychological terrors take hold when “internet influencers”, happy to plug unsafe products for cash while live streaming to the gullible, begin to disappear. Product placement, always insidious, should come with a health warning.
Central to the recurring cast are Bryan Chang Shu-hao as detective Zhao Xu-zhen, Eugenie Liu as psychiatrist Yang Nian-jun and Ivy Shao as Bai Yong-xin, less cynical streamer than conscience of the internet. Generally on the side of the good guys, they tie the episodes together but aren’t immune themselves to the charms of the outlandish must-haves of the future.
So: which goodies would take your fancy at Futmalls.com? Be careful what you wish for.