It’s easy to separate the online purchases that arrive quickly and easily at your doorstep from the individual labor that got them there: the packaging is so standardized, and the purchasing process so impersonal, that it’s tempting to think it was somehow selected and delivered by automated wizardry. But in many cases, someone is hand-picking the item from an intricately coded shelf in a vast, airless warehouse, just as someone else had the unrewarding task of delivering it to your home, or performing a number of menial intermediate stages in between. While Ken Loach’s recent film Sorry We Missed You highlighted the loneliness of a long-suffering delivery driver, Laura Carrera’s brilliant film In Downfall transforms warehouse picking from an abstract process that cannot be ignored into a human routine of vital desperation that slowly erodes.
Any comparison to Loach is backed by the film’s DNA, as Jack Thomas O’Brien, son of longtime Loach producer Rebecca O’Brien, shepherded the production through his elder’s Sixteen Films banner. Carrera, the Portuguese-born, Scottish-based writer-director, reveals herself, like Loach at his best, a socially conscious filmmaker as invested in the singular as she is in global controversy. Her first film after several well-received short films, it is first and foremost an intimate and nuanced portrait of a migrant worker gradually sinking into isolation and systemic indifference. However, through this depiction, the film offers a scathing judgment on a modern Britain characterized by ruthless labor politics, stagnant opportunity, and an uncaring acceptance of the stifling status quo.
That’s a lot to pin on a largely solitary character study, though it’s Joana Santos’s performance of unusual composure and layers that upholds the task. As Aurora, a thirty-something Portuguese woman forging a new life in an unspecified Scottish town, she returns the camera’s fixed gaze with a hollow gaze of her own, her intense inner calm animated only intermittently by a rare and fleeting understanding of sociability. Aurora’s days, spent empty-handedly picking and moving produce around a perpetually gray-lit warehouse for retailers like Amazon, are barely any relief from her evenings, which she spends largely in her room in a cramped apartment she shares with other migrant workers. They find common conversation ground in banal discussions about live streaming shows, or passive-aggressive sniping over shared facilities and kitchen storage. Raqqa is not available.
In a film with little plot, Carrera locates urgent drama in deceptively ordinary, everyday encounters. So isolated and lonely that she has lost any instinct for sociability – so much so that the text offers little of her pre-British backstory, that she seems to have forgotten it – Aurora is drawn into a pleasant but warm lunchtime small talk with a kindly local. peer. Shortly after, he was absent from work, having apparently died by suicide. When Polish truck driver Kris (Piotr Sikora) moves into the apartment and casually invites Aurora to join his friends at the bar, she eagerly accepts that she can’t quite hide it, her face a heartbreaking picture of anxious relief. Without dwelling on this point, Carrera illustrates a confined and alienated migrant experience where every greeting is an achievement, while a broken mobile phone is a severed line to the wider, distant world.
Certainly the workplace offers little human support, as Aurora repeatedly finds herself treated less like an employee than an employee—or at best a child, where constant, strenuous effort is rewarded with candy and cake rather than benefits or a raise. (Even supervisors’ compliments are offered with offhanded ambiguity, without a look in the eye.)
Through patiently escalating anger, “On Falling” traces the daily, dehumanizing microaggressions in the gig economy — the berating lectures about unmet goals, the Kafkaesque online hurdles required to book a single day off — that ultimately lead to not Aurora’s collapse but To more silence. He fell silent, too exhausted to even cry. Cinematographer Karl Korten works in the hues of bleak rain clouds with deep, sometimes protective cloaks of shadow, often holding Santos’ face in tight close-ups that feel at once sympathetic and confrontational, probing the expressions of a woman now unaccustomed to seeing her.
In a year that sees the UK transition from 14 years of Conservative austerity to a new Labor government more immediately interested in ruthless damage control than social and economic revitalization, On Falling deserves to be seen as a defining work of its very own time and place – on Although it should resonate beyond the damp island it is placed on. Having screened in Toronto before winning the Best Director award in the main competition in San Sebastian, the film has its London premiere this month – though a long global festival tour awaits, while independent distributors will be conscientious about it. (Relatively fledgling Conic has acquired UK and Irish rights.) Carreira’s film is the kind of small, still-in-the-water debut that nevertheless confidently sets out its maker’s store for future work – a clarion call for a new generation of social realist cinema, unfortunately not far away About the former, as their predecessors had hoped.