Of all the late-stage capitalist workplaces, not many have received as much horrified attention as Amazon warehouses (or ‘fulfilment centres’ in their creepy corporate newspeak), the central nervous systems of consumerism that leave employees broke and broken, long arduous hours with very little payoff. It’s into this crushingly miserable environment that first-time director Laura Carreira drops us in On Falling, making for a subtly harrowing debut of exhaustion and loneliness for workers both migrant and domestic in the Scottish winter.
Our hero, much as there can be one in a world as brutally mundane as this, is Aurora (Joana Santos), a young Portuguese woman working in Scotland in the local distribution warehouse (the company is never explicitly named, but can be safely assumed to be at least based on Amazon). We follow her humdrum, poorly paid days as she goes to work as a ‘picker’, collecting items from across the warehouse to later be packed up as deliveries, before heading home to a flat she shares with various other itinerant workers, where all she really does is eat her microwaved dinner and then scroll TikTok in bed.
It’s a grim old life, and most viewers will be able to recognise at least of the miseries as their own (for me, it was the shared house experience, where large swathes of your own ‘home’ are alien spaces), made much worse by just how lonely Aurora is. She drives to work with fellow Portuguese colleague Vera (Ines Vaz) and one of her housemates, the Polish man-with-a-van Kris (Piotr Sikora) is a bit awkward but genuinely nice, but with her exhaustion and plain poverty, Aurora cannot bring herself to have any real friends or interests.
It’s a self-destruction that is very well played by Santos, but does make Aurora a very frustrating protagonist to watch, to the point that I found it damaged the empathy the film is working to build. Though financial disaster (a broken phone and its repair costs) does dig Aurora even deeper into hopelessness, the people around her (in similar-ish situations) are able to find at least one pleasant element of life to hold on to, which seems entirely beyond Aurora. ‘Pathetic’ is not a note often played by movie protagonists, but it is the territory that On Falling circles, especially towards the end with a genuinely painful failed interview for a new job, simultaneously fascinating and off-putting to watch.
While On Falling does spend most of its time as a sad, deep-dive character study, there’s also a wider fury at play. Aurora’s work is not just menial and low-wage, it’s often a collection of humiliations, from having to pack up dildo after dildo in certain aisles to her reward for productivity being a measly single chocolate bar to management who can’t even bring themselves to see her as a human. There haven’t been many films in 2024 that feel as *real* as On Falling, an endless, oppressive grey oblivion that is chilling at its best, but numbing at its worst.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 