‘On Falling’ Review: An Episode in the Life of a Warehouse Picker, Told With Grace and Urgency
It’s easy to divorce the online purchases that arrive so swiftly and conveniently on your doorstep from the individual labor that got them there: The packaging is so uniform, the buying process so entirely impersonal, that it’s tempting to believe they were somehow selected and delivered by robotic magic. But in many cases, someone hand-picked the item from an intricately coded shelf in a vast, airless warehouse, just as someone else had the unrewarding zero-hours job of driving it to your home, or carrying out how many intermediate menial stages in between. Where Ken Loach’s recent “Sorry We Missed You” shed light on the loneliness of the long-suffering delivery driver, Laura Carreira’s remarkable “On Falling” turns warehouse-picking from an ignorable abstract process into a human routine of vivid, slowly erosive despair.
Any comparison to Loach is backed by the film’s DNA, as Jack Thomas-O’Brien, son of Loach’s longtime producer Rebecca O’Brien, shepherded the production through his elders’ Sixteen Films banner. Portuguese-born, Scottish-based writer-director Carreira reveals herself to be, like Loach in his finest hours, a socially conscious filmmaker as invested in idiosyncratic character as in more universal polemic. Her debut feature following several well-received shorts, “On Falling” is first and foremost an intimate, granular portrait of an immigrant worker gradually drowning in solitude and systemic indifference. Through that portraiture, however, the film delivers an excoriating verdict on a modern Britain characterized by compassionless labor politics, stagnant opportunity and shrugging acceptance of a stifling status quo.
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That’s a lot to pin on a largely solo character study, though a performance of extraordinary composure and layering by Joana Santos shoulders the task. As Aurora, a thirtysomething Portuguese woman forging a new life in a drably unspecified Scottish town, she returns the camera’s steady gaze with a hollowed-out stare of her own, her intense inner quiet only sporadically stirred by rare, fleeting grasps at social connection. Aurora’s days, spent blankly plucking and carting products around an eternally gray-lit warehouse for an Amazon-like retailer, are scarcely alleviated by her evenings, largely spent holed up in her room in a crammed apartment shared with other migrant workers. They find common conversational ground in banal discussions of streaming shows, or passive-aggressive sniping over shared utilities and kitchen storage. Tenderness is in short supply.
In a sparsely plotted film, Carreira locates urgent drama in deceptively ordinary, everyday encounters. So withdrawn and lonely that she’s lost any instinct for socializing — that the script details little of her pre-Britain backstory seems apt, since even she seems to have forgotten it — Aurora is drawn into mild but warm small talk one lunchtime with an affable local colleague. Soon after, he’s absent from work, having apparently died by suicide. When cheery Polish van driver Kris (Piotr Sikora) moves into the apartment and casually invites Aurora to join his friends at the pub, she accepts with an eagerness that she can’t entirely hide, her face a heartbreaking picture of anxious relief. Without laboring the point, Carreira articulates a confined, alienated immigrant experience in which every greeting is a breakthrough, while a broken cellphone is a severed line to the distant wider world.
Certainly the workplace provides little in the way of human support, as Aurora repeatedly finds herself treated less as an employee than as a facility — or at best a child, as consistent, back-breaking effort is rewarded with candy and cupcakes rather than benefits or a raise. (Even compliments from supervisors are doled out with offhand vagueness, and nary a look in the eye.)
With patiently building rage, “On Falling” tracks the daily dehumanizing microaggressions of the gig economy — the chiding lectures about missed targets, the Kafkaesque online hurdles required to book a single day off — that ultimately cause Aurora not to break down but to more silently shut down, too exhausted even to cry. Working in somber raincloud hues with deep, sometimes protective cloaks of shadow, cinematographer Karl Kürten often holds Santos’ face in tight closeups that feel both empathetic and confrontational, searching the expressions of a woman now unaccustomed to being seen.
In a year that sees the U.K. transitioning from 14 years of Conservative austerity to a new Labour government immediately concerned more with dour damage control than social and economic reinvigoration, “On Falling” deserves to be seen as a defining work of its very particular time and place — though it should resonate well beyond the damp isle on which it’s set. Having unspooled at Toronto before scooping the Best Director prize in the main competition at San Sebastian, the film had its home-turf premiere in London this month — though a lengthy global festival tour assuredly awaits, while conscientious indie distributors will take interest. (Relative newbie outfit Conic has already secured U.K. and Irish rights.) Carreira’s is the kind of small, still-waters debut that nonetheless confidently sets out its maker’s store for future work — a clarion call for a new generation of social-realist cinema, sadly not as far removed from the previous one as their forebears might have hoped.
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