On Falling – Film Review
by Hugh Maguire

Director – Laura Carreira
Writer – Laura Carreira
Stars – Joana Santos, Inês Vaz, Piotr Sikora

The subject and narrative of this film are sobering and should make all viewers take stock.  Quietly paced and with no huge dramatic turn or upset, we follow the “falling” spirt of a lonely Portuguese worker in a vast Scottish distribution warehouse.  There can’t be many who do not now buy something online.  A click on the kitchen table laptop allows us to bring the world literally to our doorstep, both virtually and in reality – a package arriving within days or even hours from anywhere in the world.  Little thought is given to the means of delivery, and the pressures on the workers to get stuff to that doorstep on time.  And, if it is one thing for a ‘man with a van’ driving around town dropping off bits and pieces it is something else for the faceless workers burrowing away in the soulless cavernous warehouses that store all of this stuff.  Even at the worst of times in something like Welsh coalmines or the back-breaking work of cotton picking on a slave plantation, there was some sense of shared experience or community, a sense of shared struggle and hardship.  There is no room for such a life in these warehouses.  Social interaction is kept to a minimum and anything that disrupts the productivity of the worker is discouraged.  The appalling, patronising, reward for a week of enhanced productivity comes to no more than a choice of a commonplace chocolate bar.

Aurora, the quiet isolated ‘picker’ (the term itself recalling slavery) is all too obviously on a downward spiral.  She shares a car to work with a friend from Portugal and seems to have no other social interaction for the rest of the day; they also share a canteen lunch table with little time for relaxation.  Any time speaking with someone or a slight delay in looking for an item on the shelf results in a beeping handset and a reminder of her moves being recorded and analysed.  A request for time off is beyond the comprehension of her manager, as everything has to be done through the company app. Living in a shared house she lacks the means, and personality, to reach out and engage.  Desperately in need of social interaction and yet lacking the wherewithal, emotionally and financially, she exists in an almost vacuum-like trance.  She clearly has a soft spot for the personable Polish housemate but seems incapable of communication.  It could all be overpoweringly grim, despite the fly-on-wall insightful quality of the acting, but there is hope and perhaps an unintended pun on the protagonist’s name. Aurora, the goddess of dawn in Roman mythology.  It is always darkest before the dawn and just when we think she can sustain no more there is a glimmer of hope.   While this leaves the viewer with some hope it is also possible that we might never buy anything online again.