On Falling (2024)

Intense but engaging fable of dehumanisation - On Falling review by PD

Social-realist films about migrant alienation, especially those set on the cold automated factory floor, can be grimly authentic to the point where the audience itself is also cut adrift. But Laura Carreira's debut feature, with its touches of sci-fi dystopia, is an enveloping portrait of dehumanisation and infantilisation which doesn’t ask for pity or outrage. Aurora (Joana Santos, excellent throughout), a young ‘picker’ in a giant fulfilment warehouse in Scotland, comes from Portugal, but she could be any lonely soul who has tried to break past the prison of small talk into a deeper human connection. Her hesitant, faltering attempts are heightened by the lack of money or prospects that leads to a life on the precipice. Everything about the management structure is designed to put distance between Aurora and humanity; the managers seem just as disconnected from fleshy hierarchies as is she. Rules and work practices just materialise from distant, unnamed planets.

Carreira, an Edinburgh resident and Portuguese native whose accomplished shorts including 'The Shift' give a clear sign as to the warming flame of her social conscience. Although it’s formally of some interest (tight close-ups in a boxy frame, ambient sound only, some street casting) the film is more daring in its juggling of emotions over a restrained run-time, always clinging to a quiet determination to put the viewer inside one lonely life, with all the risks and hopes that brings. Providing a credible social realist context while still producing cinematic highs and lows is a tough challenge - Carrera initially answers it inside the giant fulfilment centre, where goods are packed randomly to keep pickers alert. We begin with Aurora and her little automatic reader machine which impatiently beeps if she takes too long to find an item, yet could be the most responsive thing in her life. She carpools with another Portuguese colleague, and shares a building with strangers who come and go in a kitchen and life devoid of natural light. Any small talk Aurora encounters is both excruciating and impossible to break through: she is starving for a connection, which might come when a friendly Polish ‘man with a van’ moves into the house, although Aurora has almost lost the ability to speak through her loneliness. A colleague at the centre who makes a friendly overture disappears and is said to have committed suicide, all but immobilising her in terror. Any time she dares to make a tentative move outside the radius of her mobile phone the moment is brushed away – Carreira makes you understand how huge those fleeting opportunities are for a woman in her position, whereas a slight stumble such as a broken phone could crush her completely. The chance of an interview to become a care worker, deemed low-paid and low-status in the UK, is everything to her, and it’s here where Carreira ratchets up the stakes.

Thanks to the tight team-work between Carreira and her intuitive lead actor, the film becomes an intense but engaging experience, and the last scene is truly inspired. Impressive stuff.