Rating : Poor (2/5)
Genre : Sci-fi
Year : 2020
Running time : 2 hours 5 minutes
Director : Arati Kadav
Cast : Vikrant Massey, Shweta Tripathi, Nandu Madhav
Kidwise : PG
Cargo’s premise is an interesting mix of Hindu mythology and space opera. In Hindu mythology, when people die, their souls are collected by the god of death Yama. In the film, in the near future, this “traditional” death has been changed so that deaths are now processed through the Post Death Transition Services. The PDTS runs several spaceships, one of which is the Pushpak – 634A manned by Rakhasa (demon) Prahastha (Massey), and he’s been doing this single, solitary job all by himself for a very long time. Suddenly though he gets a new assistant Yuvishka Shekhar (Tripathi), and things start to change.
There are very few characters in this film. There’s Prahasta, a mild-mannered, quiet man (or demon – they look very human, apparently) who processes his “cargo” of dead people every day. The process is the same for every dead person, and monotonous but Prahastha does his job patiently and dutifully, and has come to enjoy his solitary existence. He communicates with his superiors and co-workers via video streams, but other than that and the minimum back-and-forth with his cargo, keeps very much to himself. Then there’s Nitigya Sir (Madhav), Prahastha’s boss, whom we only see through his video chats with Prahastha. And lastly, there’s University topper Yuvishka who comes on board the Pushpak-634A, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, full of new-fangled ideas on handling cargo, eager to do her job by the book.
Director Kadav shows us the isolation of Prahastha’s life, one repetitive day at a time. With the upheaval of Yuvishka’s coming, and the changing dynamics between Prahastha and Yuvishka, Kadav delves deeper into Prahastha’s personality, his repressed emotions and memories. She also touches upon changing relationships and burgeoning friendships. But that exploration feels so slight, so minute, that I can’t dredge up any strong feelings nor do I care about any of the characters!
The whole thing gets pretty monotonous – there are long scenes where the characters sit unmoving, thinking, watching – and the dialogs and the interactions between Prahastha and Yuvishka remain stilted and superficial. It is frustrating because I can feel a good film underneath all that slow-moving action, but I can’t quite get to it.
With only three characters in the film, it is a challenge to keep things interesting of course, and Kadav doesn’t quite succeed. Very few films do. One of them is the sci-fi film “Moon“, which has one character – a solitary astronaut on the moon. Another is the South Korean “Castaway on the Moon” which is more fable than sci-fi. But both these films managed to do what Cargo fails at – get us interested in their lonely protagonists.
On the positive side, I thought the premise interesting. There’s even some folklore built around the PDTS (even though it has no impact on the story), like the fact that there has been a peace treaty with the humans, or that each Rakshasa has a special superpower. The film has a low budget and the sets/the spaceship shows it, but that didn’t bother me. Also, the actors are great performers – we know that because we’ve seen them before (Laakhon Mein Ek, Raat Akeli Hai, Mirzapur) so I’m blaming the director here 🙂 .
This film doesn’t quite work, but hopefully is a precursor of things to come. I hope Kadav can refine her film-making skills and keep at it; Bollywood could sure use some good sci-fi!
Kidwise: Clean.
