On Falling: Laura Carreira’s chilling debut explores the human cost of the gig economy

I first watched On Falling, Laura Carreira’s quietly devastating study of late-stage capitalism in action, on Black Friday. That serendipitous timing is the kind of poetic flourish this careful filmmaker would never go for; but to encounter the film for the first time surrounded by algorithmically targeted banner ads and flickering digital billboards provided a sobering counterpoint. After all, Carreira’s scrupulously low-key debut feature is primarily an exploration of the cost of unfettered consumerism, a chilling exposé disguised as social realist drama.

Aurora (Joana Santos), a young Portuguese woman living in Scotland, works as a ‘picker’ at a huge Amazon-style warehouse. She spends her days patrolling shelves with a barcode scanner and picking out deliveries, badly paid and precarious work. The other employees, a mix of fellow migrants and working-class Scots, are friendly but distant. Relentless targets rule out spontaneous interactions and keep the workers endlessly on the move; in one excruciating scene, an oblivious security guard engages

Aurora in affable small talk, as she looks on helpless, her scanner beeping with increasing urgency. On Falling is a film with little conventional narrative, but in which small details slowly accumulate to revelatory effect. Over a week, we follow the rhythm of Aurora’s life, her working days, her commutes, her interactions with flatmates, her daily meals. 

An early passing mention of a fellow worker’s mysterious death gestures towards another potential avenue – psychological thriller or mystery, perhaps – but Carreira immediately turns away from that possibility. Her interest lies in understanding how such working conditions destabilise and degrade. She never offers easy villains. The managers who police outputs are hapless boy-men in oversized hi-vis, the woman who administers random drug tests is apologetic but firm; everyone here is just doing their job. The infantilisation of the modern workplace – chocolate bars and sticky cupcakes for good performance, passive aggressive reprimands for missed targets – are captured with sickening accuracy.

Carreira is particularly skilled at conjuring both the crushing banality and the otherworldly strangeness of Aurora’s working environment. An opening scene, in which anonymous workers shuffle cattle-like through a turnstile, establishes processes of dehumanisation which will soon accumulate. The entire factory is lit with the same fluorescent glow, a sickly blue-grey that makes it impossible to distinguish between day and night. Eerie touches render everyday objects – a plastic doll crying on a shelf, a package stuck rotating halfway up a conveyor belt – strange. This artificial, almost sci-fi atmosphere, cut off from markers of the natural world, serves to gradually alienate the workers from themselves and each other.

In an unnerving twist, however, Carreira also presents her characters as complicit in this alienation. Aurora clearly longs for connection, lingering in her shared kitchen while her flatmates host guests and hovering a fraction too long by the shop girl at the department store makeup counter; but when she is presented with real opportunities for social interaction she can’t fully engage. In the warehouse canteen, Aurora keeps one eye on the screen of her phone, even as she attempts fitful conversation with her colleagues; meanwhile, those colleagues have nothing much to talk about anyway, other than comparing the box-sets they are currently bingeing. Surrounded by messages that present consumerism and technology as the answer, Aurora can no longer remember the question, let alone how to ask it.

On Falling is co-produced by Sixteen Films, Ken Loach’s production company, and, given the subject matter and style, comparisons with Britain’s master of social realism are inevitable. However, it’s notable that unlike Loach’s Sorry I Missed You (2019), which tackled similar gig economy issues but built to a dramatic, heart-string tugging denouement, Carreira keeps the emotional turmoil of her characters under wraps. Aurora’s mounting distress remains hidden beneath a placid exterior, leaking out only occasionally through her huge expressive eyes. 

Thoroughly diminished by each daily humiliation, Aurora has become like the automatons that presumably one day will take her job – numb, emotionless, lost. When Carreira finally does allow feeling to break through the surface in an unexpected rush of emotion during a job interview, this small fissure cracks open the whole façade. It’s only by finally allowing herself to fall, literally and figuratively, that Aurora can feel again, and perhaps in doing so can find a route back to the self she has left, buried under stacks of cardboard and bubble wrap, back at the ironically named ‘fulfilment centre’.

► On Falling is in UK cinemas 7 March.