You could classify this superb debut feature from Laura Carreira, a Portuguese film-maker who lives in Scotland, as an exercise in abrasive social realism to compare with Ken Loach. Indeed, Sixteen Films, that director’s production company, has its name on the credits.
But On Falling is altogether weirder and more unsettling than that suggests. Carreira’s researches into online retail have led her to construct a deeply sinister world that has whispers of science-fiction dystopia.
So profound are the dehumanisation and infantilisation that, when the film’s protagonist lands a job interview in a less oppressive field, she finds herself unable to string together simple answers to basic questions. Language has abandoned her. She seems to have turned herself inside out.
What makes this so unsettling is its terrible plausibility. The film has, to this point, laid out just how an intelligent young woman might find herself so indisposed.
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Joana Santos plays Aurora, a Portuguese immigrant working as a warehouse picker in an unidentified Scottish city. The job is as unexciting as one might suspect. She pushes a trolley around the aisles and, checking her progress with a barcode scanner, gathers packages for dispatch to people she will never meet in places she will never visit.
Everything about the management structure is designed to put distance between Aurora and humanity. If she wants a day off she must key into an app on her phone. The managers seem just as disconnected from fleshy hierarchies as is she. Rules and work practices just materialise from distant, unnamed planets.
The short nights in this northern locale add to the sense of isolation. Aurora emerges from the gloomy warehouse to wintry streets and on to the underlit house she shares with a Polish pal and several others. Always hungry, shy about opening up, Aurora has her closest connection with her smartphone (or to whomever it links her). The film’s most poignant moment has her curl up alone while waiting for the device to be repaired.
There is no pretending On Falling is not a hard, grim watch. But the completeness of its construction remains a marvel throughout. And Santos deserves endless praise for communicating the despairing human eager to break out from the passive drone society wants her to be. An astonishing, unsettling fable of hidden miseries.
In cinemas from Friday, March 7th
