Karina on SpoutBlog

In its depiction of mid-80s Eastern European Communist social hell, Cargo 200 makes 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days look like Sesame Street. There are plenty of films that use real history as the jumping off point for genre fantasy, but Aleksei Balabanov’s brutal, fetid vision of personal sadism and political policy intermingled is the only work of serious, modern social criticism in recent memory that actually made me want to puke. This is a compliment of the highest order.

It’s 1984, and a professor of Scientific Atheism (academic backup for the Communist state’s embargo on religion) leaves the home of his Army colonel brother to visit their mother in fictional Russian broken-down factory town Leninsk. Along the way, his car breaks down, and he seeks refuge in the dismal, nowheresville shack of a bootlegger. The professor and the bootlegger get into a heated, vodka-fueled argument about faith and the possibility of utopia while the bootlegger’s Vietnamese handyman fixes the car. The bootlegger is drunk and riled up from the ideological debate, but the professor is ultimately able to drive off before any non-verbal conflict ensues. The bootlegger’s next guests, the boyfriend and best friend of the Colonel’s teenage daughter, are much less lucky.

To say more about the plot would spoil the excruciating experience of watching unspeakable horrors unfold in patient, matter-of-fact realism. Balabanov has crafted horror setpieces as vile (and strangely aesthetically pleasing) as anything you might see in contemporary torture porn, but Cargo’s slow-burn build (there’s a good hour of steadily mounting dread before anything remotely violent happens) give each act of rape, murder, torture and necrophilia (sometimes all on the same bed!) that much more weight.

When I sat on a jury last year at Fantastic Fest, I fought hard to give an award to Cargo 200, and my biggest obstacle was convincing my fellow jurors to overcome their gag reflex and see Balabanov’s film as a twisted work of historical activism. In a Wall Street Journal story about the controversy that surrounded the film‘s release in its home country last year, Balabanov, who is known in Russia for making relatively patriotic (and sometimes anti-American) blockbusters, said Cargo is his attempt to combat a growing Putin-fueled nostalgia for the Soviet era. “I show what filth we lived in,” the director said. I can’t vouch for Cargo 200’s verisimilitude, but as a work of cinema I’d file it alongside genre classics like Cat People and Invasion of the Body Snatchers as an allegorical polemic against a toxic but increasingly common ideology. Equal parts sad, sickening and sharply critical, it puts Eli Roth’s sensational pretenses towards cultural relevancy to shame.

A slightly different version of this review appeared during Fantastic Fest. Check out our interview with Balabanov here.