Bear with me, but here’s a question: how do you connect to other humans when you live in a harsh dystopian future where everyone shelters from the outside world in isolated pods with only apps for company? Phew. It gets answered in a light-touch, quirky kind of way in Future Date (2024), a film which is perfectly well aware of what it can do well and what it can’t, or won’t, do in its runtime and budget.
We start with a check-box rundown of the dystopia future we’re in: there’s some on-screen text describing the various reasons people can’t go outside anymore. We then meet a man called Ry (also director and co-writer Stanley Wong) who devotes a lot of time to a dating app called CNKTR, and it says a lot about our timeline that I’m sure you all just read that as it’s intended to be read. Ry wants to meet ‘the one’, but his eagerness for connection leads him to interface with the dating app like it’s a job in its own right. If you want to improve your chances of meeting ‘the one’, the of course, statistically, the best thing to do is to match with everyone. He’s less clear on the reasons why this isn’t necessarily the best approach. Next up, we meet a young woman called Ria (Shuang Hu) and she couldn’t be more different. She isn’t interested in dating, or connections; she wants a promotion, and she wants to earn enough to buy a house. Isolated shelter pod, no more. But she just can’t catch a break, and it seems like she’s going to be stuck misting her plants for all eternity, fielding critical emails from her parents as she does.
Things look up when CNKTR, under the guidance of the boss’s son Dallas (Johnny Pemberton), runs a competition: meet a person and share a connection, and CNKTR just might award the lucky couple – a house! They have to live in it together, but it’s a house, and a house is a hell of a prize. Real estate turns out to be quite an important consideration in this film; it’s important enough that Ria is willing to shelve her aversion to dating in order to be in with a chance to win; no matter that she has only just signed up for the app in order to enter the contest. Ry is no less keen on the whole soulmate thing as he too takes part in the process, but a house would be great. They get selected, which means a crash course in how to behave towards other people in person, but – it’s not a disaster. They actually get along fairly well. This is great for their personal connection score, which could help them to win that house, but what about each other? Is there more to this than just a score?
This is a film about a hundred times tonally lighter than most of the projects which find a home on this site, but Future Date is charming, engaging and nicely written, to the extent that it could carry just about anyone along with it. The filmmaker knows what we know – that nothing being presented here is ground-breaking in terms of its ideas or themes, but it’s all confidently handled with neat characterisation, a good script and a deft pace which works perfectly. There’s a sprinkling of ideas rather than a deluge, but little additions, like the morning wake-up announcement which blandly intones, ‘Here’s what can kill you today’, add something appealing and humorous. It’s a visually appealing film, too, surprisingly colourful despite the claustrophobia of a world without real windows, with some fun ‘it is what it is’ SFX. The use of split-screen is good, too, creating the illusion of more space when it might all feel a little oppressive.
As non-moralising as Future Date remains, there are some take-home messages here, all put across with characteristic calm charm. In a world where personal interaction is almost completely bound up in the virtual, it’s hard to distinguish what’s real and unreal; everything is perfunctory because it’s all about algorithms, points and feedback, and for Ria and Ry, this makes their character arcs occasionally quite tricky for them to navigate. People can be at cross-purposes, for instance, but are still being evaluated as data. All the tech in the world can’t fix this disconnect, mainly because people build apps – cutting-edge technology is hardwired to emulate (then consolidate) human awkwardness, because we make apps in our image. This is captured nicely by the character of Dallas, always at hand to generate some more comic relief.
Future Date is the previously unthinkable: a vibrant, dystopian meet cute which has heart and humour. It pokes fun at us – gently – by using a futuristic perspective to do it, and although there have to be some bleaker moments woven into the whole, given the setting and timeframe, the film gets the balance of light and dark just right. It also eschews a straightforward ‘happily ever after’ structure, giving us a little more than the expected, too. As a first feature by short movie maven Stanley Wong, there’s a lot to love here.