Cargo

The word 'great' is bandied around far too frequently these days, but 'Cargo' really deserves the tag. This film is a great big pile of rubbish. Chris (Daniel Brühl, star of 'Good Bye Lenin!') is a penniless young European in Africa who just wants to get home. To that end he stows away aboard a cargo ship bound for Marseilles. He is soon discovered and brought before the eery captain (Peter Mullan). The ship is very eery and so are the multinational crew who all say things like "What the fuck are you doing?!" and go all silent when Chris enters the mess hall. Eery too is the cargo itself, God's eeriest creation – TROPICAL BIRDS!

Mullan and Brühl are satisfactory in their roles but we learn next to nothing about their characters so that their actions and motivations remain unintelligible. The direction is equally unengaging and the potential to use the ship itself as a truly foreboding presence (like Conrad's Narcissus or the Nostromo in 'Alien') is left criminally unfulfilled. 'Cargo' meanders along without creating any genuine suspense and far too much is expected of a conclusion which can neither account for the mysteries which have occured nor excuse the preceding hour of shoddy filmmaking.