Film Brain reviews this drama in the spirit of Ken Loach, a debut feature which looks at the struggles of a warehouse picker, that kind typically associated with a major online store...
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00:00On Falling looks at the human price of online convenience, and won the Southern prize for best first feature at last year's BFI London Film Festival.
00:08Joana Santos plays Aurora, a Portuguese immigrant working as a low-paid warehouse picker in Edinburgh,
00:14striving to move up to a better job, but starts to struggle as her employment takes its toll upon her.
00:19This is the first feature from Laura Carrera, and this feels very much in the vein of the social realist films of Ken Loach,
00:24and that's not a surprise, as it's produced by Sixteen Films, the same company that backed Loach's final films,
00:30and could almost function as a companion piece to Sorry We Missed You.
00:34Amazon might not be mentioned, or their euphemism, Fulfillment Centres,
00:38but they cast a heavy shadow over the movie and the company that Aurora works for,
00:42with their blandly disingenuous corporate platitudes about supporting their workers.
00:47They describe the job as being like a treasure hunt, but the reality is a crushingly monosterous and repetitive task
00:53of pushing a trolley, finding items, and scanning barcodes, rinse and repeat, day in, day out.
01:00Oh, but if you do a really good job, they might give you a chocolate bar in a way which totally isn't patronising.
01:06But the worst part is the isolation of it, as Aurora barely sees her co-workers to even recognise them,
01:12and they often disappear, accompanied by rumours of,
01:14did you hear about what happened to that guy?
01:17And the company putting up netting on their balconies.
01:20It's the type of job synonymous with the Mong gig economy that chews people up,
01:24and while Bong Joon-ho's Mickey 17 wrapped its capitalist critique in big-budget futuristic sci-fi,
01:29On Falling is the hard contemporary reality.
01:33Featuring in every scene, Santos gives a truly heartbreaking central performance in a role
01:37which doesn't have a lot of dialogue because her actions and behaviours speak volumes.
01:42You can see it's in the food that she eats, as she's paid so little that she can barely sustain herself.
01:47Her meals consist of a cheese sandwich or some chips,
01:50or at her most desperate, a bag of crisps or a chocolate bar.
01:54She spends the vast majority of her time either working or scrimping just enough to get by,
01:59not so much living as existing,
02:02and trapped like a rolling box on a conveyor belt in a not-so-subtle metaphor.
02:07There isn't a lot of story here, but that's also kind of the point.
02:10Aurora's looming realisation of the tragedy of her circumstances and her deferred happiness
02:15hits like a tonne of bricks and is genuinely difficult to watch.
02:20Obviously, you're not going to watch this if you want escapism,
02:23but this shows cinema's power to shine a light on the marginalised and overlooked,
02:27and a reality that's all too recognisable.