On Falling review - human cogs in a merciless machine

Alienation, isolation, and instability are the fruits of working as a “picker” in the chilling labour drama On Falling. The first feature written and directed by the Porto-born, Edinburgh-based filmmaker Laura Carreira presents post-industrial gig economy work as a dystopia.

It is the kind of hell that Blake or Dickens would have excoriated, but instead of fiery red, Carreira and her cameraman, Karl Kürten, saturate their imagery in metallic blue, including most of the pickers’ clothes. Blue denotes the coldness of machinery, of which these algorithmically-tracked drudges are flesh and blood cogs. They robotically sift through digitally purchased consumer goods stored on shelves in a warehouse, scan their barcodes, drop them in a shopping cart, scan the cart’s barcodes, and move on to find the next piece of barcoded junk.

The grueling monotony of this ill-paid work has worn to an emotional husk Aurora (Joana Santos), a thirtysomething Portuguese migrant slaving in a Scottish facility like Amazon’s vast fulfilment centre in Dunfermline. She lives in a flatshare with similar strugglers but has lost her social spark and so retreated into shyness that she hesitates before accepting offers to accompany them to a pub or share a meal in the communal kitchen. Food has become an issue: she dashes to the women's bathroom to devour the garish cupcakes that the company risibly provides as worker rewards,

Aurora has no interest and no real friends. The colleague (Inês Vaz) who drives her to work and accompanies her to the canteen seems to have latched onto Aurora so that they can split the petrol cost. In contrast, the affable Polish worker (Piotr Sikora) who moves into the flat and loans Aurora money is unconcerned about being paid back. She briefly rests her head on his shoulder when she accompanies him and his friends to a disco pub but sways with her back to them on the dancefloor. Though she yearns to connect with people, Aurora has lost the will even to converse, her most intense relationship being with her Smartphone.

Carreira is a minimalist with an eye and ear for evocative scenes and moments. A package that Aurora spies revolving endlessly in the middle of a sloping conveyor belt is a metaphor for her Sisyphean routine. (Pictured above: Joana Santos)

She is too passive to avoid being trapped at her table in a fast food restaurant by four happily drunk, not unfriendly Scottish women who hem her to the wall. A young boy on a school tour of the warehouse who gleans that Aurora is miserable sympathetically unwraps a sweet and tosses it to her from a gantry. Either too proud or benumbed to pick it up, she leaves it on the floor and turns away. 

Two encounters are especially resonant. Early on, Aurora has a casual lunchtime chat with a ponytailed male picker. He seems cautiously interested in her. Perhaps he’ll soon befriend her or ask her out? Instead, he abruptly disappears from the film. Their meeting isn’t a narrative cul-de-sac but an omen.

Desperate to find alternative employment, Aurora has will enough to get an interview for a job in social care. En route to it, she browses in a department store. She is so needy of intimate connection that she succumbs to the pampering of a beauty consultant (Ainsley Jordan), who bathes Aurora in attention as she applies eyeshadow to her lids. The woman is decent enough to advise Aurora not to wear the dark blue that she favours to the interview and replaces it with a lighter blue, but she unsurprisingly segues into a hard sell for a foundation product with a discount bonus.

Aurora, played with formidable restraint by Santos, spends her waking hours catering to consumer greed, as both grubber and cellphone obsessive, yet she is so stunned by her predicament that she has no sense of how it has been capitalistically determined. Inevitably, the interview does not go well. What happens afterwards can be summed up by the biblical verse “Do not rejoice over me, my enemy; When I fall, I will arise” (Micah 7:8).

In its fierce condemnation of worker exploitation and its social realist style, On Falling is analogous to Ken Loach’s films, notably the gig economy family drama Sorry We Missed You (2019). It was, in fact, produced by Jack Thomas-O’Brien, the son of Loach’s producer Rebecca O’Brien for her and Loach’s Sixteen Films.

Carreira was influenced by Loach, but On Falling also reminds me of the labour documentaries of the Chinese director Wang Bing, while its depiction of a dehumanized drone unravelling strangely recalls the first half of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987). But Carreira’s voice and vision are her own.

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