Cargo (2018)

Logic would dictate that there aren't any more good zombie stories to tell. There has been such a deluge of zombie stories that one would assume the genre has been over-saturated. Which is why I am always surprised that good ones keep getting made. The Girl With All The Gifts, The Battery, and Maggie, are all examples of how the genre remains alive (undead?) despite the plethora of titles. Cargo is now another.

Martin Freeman is a man with a baby who has been bitten and has a couple of days before he turns. He spends the film searching for someone to raise her before he succumbs to zombie life.

Freeman's performance is touching and the film smartly focuses on the pathos more than the scares giving him a great opportunity to show off his thespian skills, especially at the end when he says goodbye. Like the best zombie films the story in Cargo is an analogy, in this case for parenting, how parenting is an exercise in preparing your children to be independent of you, the letting go involved in that. Cargo uses the horror inherent in the essence of zombie stories as a tool to express just how horrifying being a parent is.

Cargo sometimes feels a bit too succinct. It has an episodic nature as Freeman goes from one encounter to the next, and many of them feel a little short. Time could have been taken to flesh out more of these vignettes and this could have given each more weight. The film feels like it's trying to be economical and sometimes that has the effect of watering it down a bit. But despite that Cargo remains a strong film.

I guess the zombie genre will never die as long as good movies like this keep getting made.

Cargo
Starring: Martin Freeman, Simone Landers, Anthony Hayes
Directors: Ben Howling, Yolanda Ramke
Writer: Yolanda Ramke