Director: Arati Kadav

Cast: Vikrant Massey, Shweta Tripathi

It’s tricky to classify Cargo into a specific film genre. You’re tempted to say ‘Sci-fi’. Well yes, most of the film does unfold in space, inside a spaceship called Pushpak. The main protagonist in the story is an astronaut. But then, there’s also a mythological twist to all this. The film opens with a card that informs us about the ‘Manushya Rakshas Peace Treaty’ that’s been signed on Earth. Homo Sapiens have deceased, probably after a bloody war with ‘Homo Rakshasas’, and now the Rakshas (demon) community seek to make amends and use their tech know-how to help reincarnate humans. The Rakshas fraternity have also submitted to an ‘image makeover’, and promised to co-exist with the human race. So should we re-align our understanding now and call this a Fantasy film?

The Director Arati Kadav piques our interest and intrigue with this quirky set up. The main protagonist is an astronaut ‘demon’ named Prahastha (Vikrant Massey), who is the commander and lone passenger of a spaceship called Pushpak. Before you ask, these ‘demons’ look exactly like normal humans and even speak the same language. The only difference is, they all have one special superpower each. Prahastha for instance can make things levitate. They apparently also don’t age the same as humans. We hear Prahastha has been on Pushpak for seventy-five years now and he hardly looks thirty.

Prahastha and Pushpak are employed by a company called PDTS, that stands for Post Death Transition Services. Once humans die on Earth, they are labelled as ‘cargo’ and beamed up into space, into Pushpak. Here they get put through a series of steps like ‘identification’, ‘healing’ and finally ‘extraction’, where the soul is set on its way to its next incarnation or birth.

“So is this heaven or hell?”, asks one deceased man, recently entered into Pushpak.

“It’s neither. There is nothing of that sort for real. Everyone who dies has to come here only” clarifies Prahastha.

By this time you get an inkling of what the director aims to achieve through this film. It’s pretty ambitious, but attempted at a relatively minimalistic scale. There are going to be no bombastic alien attacks on the spaceship, nor is there going to be time travel through wormholes in this film. In fact, the closest we get to ‘space action’ here is a meteor shower. The real question being raised is more existential and philosophical. Aren’t we all still aliens to the truth behind our own creation?

Things change on board Pushpak for Prahastha as a new demon assistant Yuvishka (Shweta Tripathi) joins him. It’s fair to say Prahastha doesn’t enjoy this new found company one bit. It’s a different matter that Yuvishka is the first ‘living’ person who’s been inside the spaceship apart from himself for eons. The stumbling block is probably the generation gap. Yuvishka is what you would call your classic millennial demon. Her character sketch is satirical and her idiosyncrasies cracked me up during various scenes. She is addicted to social media, especially Facebook and Instagram Live. She has healing powers. She also has a younger brother..called Ghatotkach!

Cargo is a film that invests heavily in a stream of quirks and eccentricities than a traditional plot-driven narrative to keep things moving. The topics it addresses are heavy, but the writing is light and often filled with humour. Great care is taken to create the universe the film is set in. A Pop singer named Shurpanaka and ads that promise ‘A Great AFTERlife’ had me in splits. The whole story is shot using only two production sets, one for scenes inside the spaceship and the other for a handful of exterior shots. Even the predominantly blue-grey colour palette is pretty basic. However, aided by Kaushal Shah’s superb camera work it all comes together very well visually in an aesthetic sense.

The film probably slacks a little towards the end when the absence of a solid plot starts showing. What’s the end-game, you wonder. The final act has a gentle undercurrent to it and essentially plays out around the possibility that both Prahastha and Yuvishka could be evicted from the spaceship for different reasons, just as a bond seems to be blossoming between them. There is an element of suspense, but we could have perhaps done with a little more drama and conflict.

Cargo is a subversive film that trusts its audience to delve on and interpret its discourse. It takes inspiration from films like 2001: A Space Odyssey or even Interstellar, in the way it speaks subtly about the immortality of love among other highbrow themes. I expect multiple viewings of this film would reveal more interesting trivia and uncover many hidden notes. My own takeaway after one viewing wasn’t earth-shattering, but still powerful enough and thought provoking, that ‘life’ simply goes on, even after death. So maybe ‘slice of life’, that’s the genre this film fits perfectly into.

Cargo is now available to stream on Netflix.

Overall rating: 3/5