Cargo 2019

Cargo, produced like a skit on a low budget, is a snoozefest that is not clear about its objective. It starts off with an aspiration to be a sci-fi drama about loneliness in the space where the protagonist (Vikrant Massey), a staff at an imaginary post-death transition services agency, has been spending decades and working solo in a breathing spacecraft named Pushkar-something without much contact with the outer world. Then it aims higher and brings in another character (Shweta Tripathi) and scrambles to turn itself into an emotional story about companionship and how ignorance is not always bliss. Without enough background to the story, the plot (where dead people are sent to this transition agency and then sent back home as a new person in optionally some other form) - which is quite zany, to be fair to writer-director Arati Kadav - does not explain things that are essential for its upkeep and interest and just fumbles every now and then until one of the three main characters utters a few words of philosophy and/or existentialism while sipping cola from a Styrofoam cup. I understand the restrictions low budget can put on the production but watching Cargo reminded me of those substandard comedy skits that they play on Indian national television during primetime with canned laughter in the form of a human being as its main character. Even the spacesuits look like they were made out of bed sheets. That skilled actors like Massey and Tripathi are not utilized well shows the additional lack of efforts put in the writing and the direction. Nothing gels in the avant-garde hopeful that this film turns out to be but falls extremely short of every single ingredient except for maybe the score. Watch the HBO drama Six Feet Under (2001) and space stuff Gravity (2013) again and forget that Cargo even existed and that Vikramaditya Motwane or Anurag Kashyap helped produce this technical drivel for laymen. TN.

(Watched and reviewed at its world premiere at the 21st MAMI Mumbai Film Festival.)

— Tejas Nair