Awestruck, and sick in the stomach. That's what I am right now. And it's not because of some bad goulash. (Hungarian food, get it? It would be such a stereotype.) Well, partly because I went down with a cold recently, but it's hardly the root cause.

Cargo 200 or Gruz 200 in Russian is the name of the sickness. The brainchild of writer/director Aleksey Balabanov caught me by surprise. I must tell you, after seeing The Trial of Tony Blair a few days ago, I sincerely thought that the best of the festival's offering was behind me. Boy, was I wrong.

This sickening, Russian Fargo and Last House on the Left combined is something to behold, and get shocked by. To sum it up, it's an exploitation film, with only a fragment of direct visual exploitable elements of an Italian or American horror movie of the ’70s and ’80s, but with a large boulder of mauling shock and depression. Based on true events that happened in Russia in1984 during their Afghan war, it's even more frightening to think about. A disgusting tale of the kidnapping, slavery, and rape of a young girl is so powerful that many viewers will remember pictures from it that were never actually shown. Your mind fills in the holes.

I was not sure that the movie was from this year or just got to this festival after a few years or even a decade, but no, it was produced in 2007, yet it has the visuals of a classic exploitation film from 2-3 decades ago. I won't go in to any more detail, as I could go on for pages. One piece of advice, check it out if you can handle this kind of stuff. It's much more thought-provoking than a regular exploitation flick.

And it had this effect on me, even though this viewing was the technicaly least pleasing so far. I don't know if my computer mocked me, my net connection, or the film/webpage was faulty, but my media player crashed like three times, I had buffering problems for 20 minutes, and then all the way through the film, it was jerky at points. An annoying and awful 86 minutes (actually more like a 100 because of the errors). Yet this experience is on par with the Tony Blair flick, and even surprised me.

As an avid horror fan, I'm a bit desensitized by onscreen violence, but this one proved a perhaps well-known truth in filmmaking: you don't need to show the actual horror directly. Mood and the environment are much more important. Add to that my distant childhood memory of the image of socialist poverty, depicted here in the extreme, it caught me. I never lived in poverty but many images, like concrete block houses (I live in one to this day), ugly stagnation, and the dope-fiends of the East: alcoholics are all too familiar.

This is the rare and marvelous case when a movie hits the right note.