La carga
2017 · 14m · Suecia
Directed by Niki Lindroth von Bahr
Genres: dark comedy, experimental, musical
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
An apocalyptic-toned musical short divided into four episodes that take place in a supermarket, a long-stay hotel, a call centre and a hamburger joint.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A four-part apocalyptic musical set in the most aggressively mundane locations imaginable—supermarket, hotel, call centre, hamburger joint—is exactly the kind of premise that makes people squirm before they get it. Lindroth von Bahr takes the form most hostile to darkness (the musical) and weaponizes it against late-stage capitalism's most suffocating spaces; it shouldn't work, and it absolutely does.
The formal architecture here is impeccable—each episode's location becomes a chamber for ritualized despair, and the musical form invokes a lineage of Brechtian alienation that gives the absurdism weight rather than mere provocation. Von Bahr's editing sustains the tonal register across four distinct environments without losing the compositional through-line.
The decision to make this a *musical*—to have characters sing their entrapment in these fluorescent purgatorios—is the hinge the entire film turns on; it transforms what could have been straightforward social critique into something genuinely unsettling, where melody becomes a trap itself.