What a view | Nowhere Man on Netflix – not your average Taiwanese triad gangster series

Triad and tested Taiwanese gangster series Nowhere Man isn’t your common crime thriller. The regular components – sadistic violence, betrayal, jealousy, scheming rivals, a brawl at a showpiece mob funeral and a profound commitment to keeping the tobacco industry afloat – are all present and correct.

But even the most pernicious gangland bosses can seem passé eventually. Maintaining the intrigue through the eight episodes of the first season, now streaming on Netflix, is its supernatural element.

Ah Quan (Joseph Chang), a thug with some insight into the world and an empathetic streak to go with his fists of stone, can see the future, or at least divine different outcomes for certain events. He can sense the effect his insalubrious lifestyle is going to have on his friends and family. Meanwhile, in flashback, we revisit milestones in his criminal past, which cause Ah Quan to regret the choices that brought him here in the first place.

“Here” is prison, the death-row environs of which he must depart, and sharpish, to save his kidnapped son. His mission, which he has no choice but to accept, is the upshot of two conflicting criminal jobs a decade apart: one way of saying that the sins of the father shall be visited upon the children, regardless of occasional muddiness of plot. Such are the occupational hazards of an adventurous, non-linear script.

Ah Quan’s wife, Jiang Jing-fan (Alyssa Chia), has more smarts than the average gangster’s moll, but nevertheless sticks by him, perhaps because he’s devoted to his autistic brother and helps out at his mother’s pavement kitchen. Goons proliferate, mob bosses come and go and the eddies swirl around so much it can feel like the narrative river is reversing its flow. But Ah Quan has too much going on in his head to prove a real nowhere man. We can work it out.

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