Cargo Analysis

 Cargo (2020)

Written & Directed by: Arati Kadav
Starring: Vikrant Massey, Swetha Tripathi
Streaming on Netflix.

The setting of the film is interesting - it's what they call 'Post Death Transition Services'. So naturally, the film explores a lot of death, and it is very casual about it. It is their daily job, and they are used to it - which is why the film is so light about it. It hits us sometimes though, it is counterintuitive - when filmmakers use sad music over a death scene, they are directing us to feel sad whereas if they don't play anything, then the filmmaker is just presenting the scene and letting us feel however we feel, and if they instead play happy music on a death scene - it indicates the largeness of life and it tells us that this death is inconsequential in the larger scheme of things, and it reminds us that such deaths are happening all over right now. This hits on another level, this was done in the happy voice over by Aisha in The Sky is Pink and in Mary and Max too, it makes us feel bittersweet and it puts us in a state of not being able to articulate how we feel. All deaths are dealt in this way in this film. 

There is an Interstellar-esque sequence between Vikrant Massey and Konkana Sen Sharma - it doesn't work here because we don't know enough about the characters to feel for them for their longing - we know about Prahastha, but we don't know about Prahastha's love language till then. In Interstellar we know the dynamics between the father and daughter before - this scene starts and we know that this is a 96-esque dynamic here and the scene immediately jumps to poignancy without taking us there. I wish I understood more about the characters, they definitely seemed interesting - although it became challenging to understand characters in the context of the world. This film is definitely layered, and it feels like a bunch of stories intersecting with each other, just like life. I felt that if there was some hook for us to latch on to, which spiked our curiosity then it'd have been a riveting experience to explore all the intersecting stories within the setting.