Carga is a 2019 drama about a lorry, a road and an unpredictable destiny, all intersecting in a human trafficking network.
Every once in a while, a film comes along that sort of has you take stock of even the most seemingly insignificant fortunes of your life, from a roof over your head to three hot meals a day. So many lack what we take for granted and some, struggling to find a better life, end up as victims in a system that seems impossible a thing to exist in modern society, the trafficking of human beings. The movies have of late taken to exposing more to audiences about these horrors – rightfully so – hoping to raise awareness, and now comes writer/director Bruno Gascon‘s entry into the troubling mix, a multi-language drama called Carga that pulls no punches in its attempts at pulling back the curtain on the very worst of what we as a species seem capable of. It’s a traumatizing, harrowing experience unlike anything you’ll likely see this year.
It follows Viktoriya (Michalina Olszanska), a young woman from Russian in the wake of the Soviet breakup, alone and desperate to cross the border and start again. She ends up in the back of a cargo truck driven by Antonio (Vítor Norte), an old Portuguese man struggling to take care of his wife and granddaughter, bound to the menacing Viktor (Dmitry Bogomolov), a mafia man who deals in human trafficking as payment for helping people cross to ‘freedom.’ She’s delivered, along with others believing in a promise, into a nightmare, where misery, butchery, and sudden, cruel death are a way of life.
Language plays a key role in Gascon’s film, everyone speaking to each other in different mother-tongues, some with control over others, some screaming for understanding. There’s an early scene where that understanding is made entirely with pointed pistols, some firing and some not, detailing to all facing their barrels, everything they (and we) need to know. It’s truly frightening. Even more impactful, its mirrored by a shot of Antonio howling into the night void that feels weightier the more the story progresses, forcing us to confront his own horrors.
That’s the ultimate power of Carga, its astonishing ability to darken every corner while simultaneously shining a very vivid light. This is not a stylized portrayal of this madness but a jarring, achingly painful examination of a reality no person should endure. It’s not that Gascon relies on brutal violence in making us feel connected to these images, something we’ve long become desensitized to in this age of graphic storytelling, it’s that what we see feels almost unbearably real. Be warned, Carga sinks into terrible darkness, where beatings and rape are not used as punishment but as communication.
There’s not a lot of dialogue between the few characters in Carga, much of the film shot in the bowels of a quasi-prison for a cluster of young women, the film purposefully bleak in unspooling their fates. When someone does talk, often it stings with trauma, as when one woman (Ana Cristina de Oliveira) explains to another (Sara Sampaio) why she’s been brought here and how she’s going to pay what she owes. I won’t spoil a single word of it, but it’s one of the most disturbing few minutes I’ve seen on film in a long time. You can’t help but know that this same speech is a reality for too many young women in the real world.
Carga clocks in at just under two hours, and while it’s not filled with a lot of action, it’s nonetheless often a breathless experience. Gascon uses deep shadows and intense light to keep us off-balance, patiently – almost boldly – challenging us to sit and endure the truth of what lies behind his film. There’s no exploitation in any of this, despite its potential, instead a carefully crafted message that will surely horrify most. It has its flaws, certainly, but Carga manages to keep true to its intent, and while its themes and presentation may keep some at bay, it’s not trying to make it easy. Nor should it be. It should be hard to watch. It should jolt us. The most troubling thing being that it’s a story needing to be told at all.