An intelligent zombie film with brains and heart, CARGO is a heart of darkness excursion up a river and into the interior of an apocalyptic Australia..
In a desperate bid to outrun a violent pandemic, Andy and Kay have holed up on a houseboat, Ruthie, with their one-year-old daughter, Rosie. When their peaceful river existence is shattered by a violent attack, ironically from the yacht Serendipity, Andy takes his family ashore to seek help for his badly injured wife.
Right away we are drawn into empathetic embrace with this couple – the chemistry between Susie Porter as Kay and Martin Freeman as Andy fairly fizzes with felicity.
At its core, CARGO is a dual father/daughter love story, unfolding against the backdrop of a deadly outbreak. The film explores two parallel tales of familial devotion: an infected man’s mission to seek a new home for his infant daughter and conversely, a young Indigenous girl’s quest to save the soul of her infected father.
CARGO’s genesis was as a short film made for Tropfest and in developing CARGO from short film to feature there’s been an expansion of the emotional character elements and a quest to realise new ways to elevate and invigorate the post-apocalyptic genre: the presence of Indigenous survivors.
Australian film-makers, Yolanda Ramke and Ben Howling co-wrote the script and have constructed a narrative vessel that navigates Australia’s collective national history in an innovative and hugely entertaining way.
Loaded with the cargo of an Indigenous dimension, which includes a pivotal role for a young girl in the form of Thoomi, the film’s manifest strikes an entirely credible notion that, in such a global catastrophe, a community of Indigenous people with strong ties to living off the land might be best equipped to endure and flourish.
CARGO is a zombie film for film-goers who don’t go to zombie films, as it questions what it means to be a ‘zombie’ from a spiritual standpoint via the Indigenous belief of ‘soul stealing’ and explores the schism between modern society and traditional society.
Martin Freeman and Susie Porter lead a strong cast that includes Caren Pistorius, Kris McQuade ,Bruce R Carter, Natasha Wanganeen, Anthony Hayes, and David Gulpilil with an astonishng feature film debut by Simone Landers as Thoomi.
Directed by Yolanda Ramke, CARGO exudes a majesty of scope in story and the sumptuous, splendid cinematography of Geoffrey Simpson.
Production values, performances and narrative are far superior to the current cash cow champion of cataclysmic aftermath, A Quiet Place, so CARGO deserves to make a bigger noise at the box office.