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Fantasmas’ vision of the future is a dystopian dreamland
In Julio Torres’ series Fantasmas, survival in the future is an intricate, corporate-owned game of feeding your identity to the machine.
The avant-garde weirdness and practically created artistry of Fantasmas — Max’s new series from Problemista writer / director Julio Torres — makes it seem infinitely more whimsical and lighthearted than most other TV shows about people living in the robot-filled near-future. Because Julio’s robot assistant Bibo (Joe Rumrill) isn’t trying to kill him, and his need for an apartment becomes subsumed in a quest to find a lost oyster-shaped earring, Fantasmas doesn’t look or feel like many other recent stories about dystopian futures. Though Fantasmas isn’t going for a Matrix-style narrative about humans fighting machines, it becomes easier to read as a story about resisting the commodification of one’s entire being as Julio encounters other eccentrics like Chester (Tomas Matos) — a cab driver rallying against Uber with his one-man ridesharing service — reluctant to sign up for Proof of Existence.
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