Upon its Russian release in 2007, Cargo 200 immediately provoked a national furor. Alexei Balabanov’s grim little movie centers around one Captain Zhurov (Alexei Poluyan), a police officer in 1984’s Soviet Russia who uses his position of authority to essentially institutionalize rape, prisoner beatings and all-round mayhem.  In a typical scene, he tosses the corpse of a girl’s soldier-fiance next to her while she’s chained to a bed and proceeds to read the dead man’s love letters.

When I first saw Cargo 200, I thought it was supposed to be black comedy, but it isn’t; its pitch-perfect production design is part of a whole package designed to check any nostalgia for the departed Soviet era, even if it summons up long-gone discotheques and hairstyles effortlessly. Cargo 200 itself is the code word for the boxes in which dead soldiers are shipped back from Afghanistan, which pretty much sums up the grim tone. Already available through Netflix, Cargo 200 receives a much-deserved if small release January 2; Balabanov’s film is appalling, but it’s also surprisingly elegant.

A few contextual things you may like to know: despite working as an interpreter for two year in the ’80s, Balabanov will only do interviews in Russian, so I spoke with him over the phone in that language. Balabanov is not what you might consider a tactful, soft-spoken guy: in an interview in 2007 with “Novaya Gazeta,” he responded to a question about charges of xenophobia with the terse statement, “In every country there are decent people and there are freaks.” Cargo 200 is his first film to be screened outside of festivals in the US in a decade, since 1997’s Brother, so I’ve included contextual notes as needed.

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