A young Portuguese migrant worker lives a life of quiet desperation in writer-director Laura Carreira’s On Falling, an intimate social-realist character study about the soul-numbing horror of low-wage jobs at the sharp end of 21st century capitalism. This commendably earnest but dramatically arid debut was produced by Sixteen Films, the British company co-founded by veteran left-wing director Ken Loach, with whom the Portugal-born, UK-based Carrera shares a socially engaged viewpoint and naturalistic docu-drama style, though her approach is less didactic and more understated. A little too understated, frankly, as this relentlessly sombre workplace glumfest ultimately feels light on plot dynamics or political insight.
World premiered in Toronto, On Falling makes its European debut in competition in San Sebastian over the coming week, with a London Film Festival slot to follow next month. A solidly crafted calling card for Carreira’s future career, it should find a discerning audience given its cinematic pedigree, worthy intentions and timely subject matter. But more neutral, less indulgent viewers may be underwhelmed at yet another thinly articulated critique of socioeconomic power structures wrapped in yet another dry, earnest package.
Joana Santos gives a soulful, mostly internalised performance as Aurora, a Portuguese economic migrant living in contemporary Scotland. She works long hours for low pay as a “picker” at a nameless fulfilment centre, prowling the aisles of a giant Amazon-style warehouse collecting items to be sent off to customers. Her heavily controlled, digitally monitored job is mindless, physically draining and mentally soul-destroying. Besides drawing on her own experiences as a poorly paid migrant worker in Scotland, Carreira also incorporates anecdotes from real pickers into her script, and employs several in the background cast.
Aurora makes polite small talk with her multinational team of co-workers, but their connections are flimsy and fleeting. A brief hint of workplace flirtation is soon snuffed out in a bleak plot twist, which occurs off screen. The centre’s prison-like atmosphere is reinforced by the company’s fake-cheery managers, who throw grimly compulsory parties for their employees one week, then subject them to random drug tests the next. In her festival press notes, Carreira explains how she views these vast retail warehouses as emblematic of the worst extremes of late capitalism, where alienated workers are reduced to faceless drones inside a giant algorithm.
Outside work, Aurora ‘s life seems no less hellish. She rents a small room in a hostel-like house-share alongside multiple tenants, mostly European migrants like her. The arrival of Polish van driver Kris (Piotr Sikora) appears to offer fresh social horizons, even the vague promise of romance, but ultimately Aurora withdraws deeper into a depression that she scarcely recognises. She dreams of escape by applying for other jobs, but this brings fresh obstacles which only highlight her increasingly strained mental state. When she eventually reaches snapping point, Carreira sketches her breakdown in tender but studiously non-melodramatic terms, maintaining her tonal restraint to the last frame.
A key selling point of On Falling is how completely Carreira immerses viewers in Aurora’s hopeless, joyless, powerless life. A key flaw in the film is just how well she succeeds. Our almost unreadable heroine is portrayed as a painfully isolated soul with very few friends and no family, no apparent sexual or romantic impulses, no interior life, no cultural or intellectual hinterland. As a means of depicting the slow-motion trauma of poverty, exile and workplace depression, this approach is highly effective. But as an exercise in cinematic drama, it soon becomes grindingly, almost obstinately glum.
The emotional austerity at the heart of On Falling extends to the film’s aesthetic language. Carreira and her German cinematographer Karl Kürten mostly shoot Aurora in plain, empty, solitary settings, hemmed in by drab apartment walls or towering warehouse shelves. Colours are muted and geography vague, the film-makers purposely avoiding wider vistas of their Edinburgh and Glasgow locations, presumably to prevent any hint of beauty spoiling the gloomy mood. Lightly sprinkled with dour classical pieces and mournful folk ballads, the soundtrack adds to this sense of muted despair and spiritual defeat.
On Falling feels oddly out of step with recent female-led developments in social realism, from Fish Tank (2009) to Girlhood (2014), from Nomadland (2020) to Scrapper (2023), films which typically depict working-class lives as full of humour, music, lyricism, emotional warmth and lusty defiance. Joy as an act of resistance. Wholly defined by her job, Aurora acts more like a symbolic victim than a fully rounded human protagonist. The overall effect is a kind of pessimism porn, finely crafted and well acted, but too steeped in monotonous misery to usefully engage our rage or empathy. Hopefully Carreira’s future work will address these timely, heavy themes with more originality and passion.
Director, screenwriter: Laura Carreira
Cast: Joana Santos, Inês Vaz, Piotr Sikora, Jake McGarry, Neil Leiper
Cinematography: Karl Kürten
Editing: Helle le Fevre
Music: Ines Adriana
Producers: Jack Thomas-O’Brien, Mário Patrocínio
Production companies: Sixteen Films (UK), BRO Cinema (Portugal)
World sales: GoodFellas
Venue: San Sebastian International Film Festival (Competition)
In English, Portuguese, Polish
104 minutes
