Freight (Crushing Sci-Fi Existentialism)
It saddens me when I see such great, short films receive so little attention, and when they do on bigger sites it’s another drop in the constant stream of digital vomit bigger names spew out at too fast a rate to notice all for the sake of quantity in this age of consume at a quicker rate. Work like Freight needs space to be understood not merely in a glimpse, it requires a thorough viewing, and hopefully this review does it proper justice to entice you into its forlorn atmosphere. Ready to quit life? Well you soon will be.
The director of Freight, Sava Zivkovic, has done work for video games and even his own Star Wars fan film. This particular short is different, however, and hits on a much deeper level thanks to an incredibly skilled team in it for the art. Originally intended as a pitch for a client to display the use of real-time ray tracing technology, Freight was totally open-ended in concept, as it was meant to display the tech’s application before the actual project began, which due to various problems never occurred. This left Zivkovic and his team with a completed idea they decided to expand upon. The original pitch timeline was only a startling seven days and when the client was unable to fund, they decided to finish it entirely themselves.
Freight was filmed using a variety of techniques we won’t detail here; the story it tells is our interest. The main character, described by Zivkovic as a “creature,” is a humanoid in a futuristic suit who comes out of a stupor in an unspecified, oppressive location that looks like the interior of a vast, alien volcano. He has fallen from something above, and as he weakly pulls himself upright, picks up a glowing, red device he then drags along towards an unknown target through the increasingly bleak and expansive environment. Eventually he reaches a wall in which he places a heart-like device from the cargo, and then the wall reveals thousands of heart-like devices as the humanoid character collapses in a state of despair.
The tagline of Freight, “The Story of the Weight Within Us,” is about as clear as it gets. Its complete lack of dialog leaves the viewer to rely entirely on visuals, and the ending, which can be interpreted in a number of ways, has a clear theme of pointlessness and the realization we all face of our endless drudge of existence. It’s that one moment when it hits and you say “shit this is it…” Perhaps you collapse, cry, smash yourself in the face, or finally decide to jump off that bridge everyone keeps talking about. The humanoid entity in Freigh represents this existential crisis in an abstract, yet tangible way that hits in the soul like a denial of God. The depth captured in such a short amount of a space is proof of Zivkovic and his team’s creative skill, which we can only hope expands from the success of this short. A definite must-watch for all of you who have yet to realize how futile your day-to-day really is. Quit life!
Sava Zivkovic Official Behance
Written by Stanley, Devourer of Souls
Exorcism (2019)
Sava Zivkovic (director), Various Team members (production)
4.3 / 5
