Cargo 200 ( MIFF, IMDB ) is the bleakest, darkest film I’ve seen in a long time and possibly ever. It’s a well made film but the subject matter is so dark that it is hard to stomach. It’s like watching Dostoyevsky crossed with Silence of the Lambs and where there is a undercurrent of political commentary.
The film tells the story of a drunken night and its aftermath. An academic, amusingly a professor of Scientific atheism is visiting his brother and mother. His car breaks down on the way to see his mother and he stops at an illegal vodka distillery. His brother’s daughter’s friend slightly later hooks up with a shady young man who drives her to the same spot. The academic has left by then, but has an idea of the place. After this, things become really, really horrible.
A policeman then terribly abuses the huge authority that the government has in a totalitarian society. The ‘cargo 200′ of the title also comes into play. This was the title given to the coffins of Soviet soldiers that were coming back from Afghanistan.
The film shows the dull grey awfulness of an industrial town under communist rule. The walls are always cracking, there is smoke everywhere, the streets are potholed. It looks dire. The music is deliberately loud and abrasive, it is optimistic Soviet pop in contrast to the dire reality of underground anger of music of the period. Power comes from the government, you have to be in the police, a senior administrator or in the army to have any standing. There is something of the future mentioned in the film, the shady young man is a black marketeer and at the end of the film he is seen talking to son of the academic about how to make more money. It gives the feeling of what would come after the collapse of the USSR.
This was a good film, but it’s a good film because it present horrible events, based on a true story apparently, in a way that shows another side to how awful Soviet Russia was. It’s hard to recommend it though because it is just so dark.
3.5/5
i instinctly knew when i had finished this morbid piece of mind-rape that under no circumstances whatsoever the depicted story could be “based on a true story” as the viewer is informed both at the beginning and the end (“second half of 1984″) and that the characters are not based on a disintegrating society but based on the sickened mind of an author.
thanks to “aschenker” i have been able to confirm this notion.
i have been lured into this malicious propaganda piece because of fraudulent advertising.
had i known that i would be exposed to such an unbearable insult at humanity and film-making i would have rejected even glancing at one minute of it.
the hypocricy of this film is mind boggling:
it pretends to mirror a “sick society” when it actually just exploits this “setting” to project the sick constructions of an embittered author (Faulkner) and film-maker onto this setting and into the brain of the viewer.
i would advise others not to watch this trash for the sake of mental and moral hygiene.