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Serbia, France, Croatia · 2019
1h 36m
Director Ognjen Glavonić
Starring Leon Lučev, Pavle Čemerikić, Tamara Krcunović, Ivan Lučev
Genre Drama
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Vlada works as a truck driver during the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999. Tasked with transporting a mysterious load from Kosovo to Belgrade, he drives through unfamiliar territory, trying to make his way in a country scarred by war. Once the job is over, he will need to return home and face the consequences of his actions.
The New York Times by Glenn Kenny
The gray skies under which Glavonic shoots, the unhurried takes in which he chronicles the drive, they put us with Vlada in an unmitigated way, the better to compel viewers to ask themselves what they would do in his position.
Chromatically, The Load makes Saving Private Ryan look like The Band Wagon. Yet Glavonic still manages to convey the devastation and numbness that results from atrocity without resorting to exploitation. Trauma is approached obliquely, more a subliminal fact of life than a single psychological rupture to be confronted and mended.
It requires a degree of commitment on the part of the viewer to join the sparsely placed dots of Glavonić’s harshly intelligent and uncompromisingly spare story, especially when the picture they form is so harrowing. But the elements that frustrate can also devastate.
The A.V. Club by Lawrence Garcia
As intelligently crafted as the film is, Glavonić’s directorial strategies do end up limiting the film’s observational power.
RogerEbert.com by Matt Fagerholm
This is one of the year’s best films.
It’s like we’re front-seat passengers, and though it induces much anxiety, “The Load” compels us to keep both eyes forward lest we miss whatever might happen next.
Los Angeles Times by Robert Abele
The overtly graphic isn’t Glavonic’s visual style, but rather a cold, more powerful image seepage — what a man’s physicality says about complicity, and what a shot of the muddied ground near a hosed-down truck says about what war does to the ground, a land and the soul.
If any colour represents the long-term impact of war, it’s the blend of beige and grey that fills The Load’s quietly powerful frames.
The Hollywood Reporter by Stephen Dalton
This well-intentioned meditation of the banality of evil packs a modest emotional punch, but it might have been more powerful if it had shown us a little less banality and a little more evil.
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