Building on her superb pair of short films, Laura Carreira’s first feature, ON FALLING, achieves the difficult credit of being both a deeply affecting character story and a compelling indictment of how precarious labour markets undermine our communities.
The film is spent with Aurora (Joana Santos), a Portuguese expat who works in an online retail distribution warehouse. She shares a flat with several other people, and whilst she doesn’t initially appear deeply unhappy, Carreira’s script and camera and Santos’s subtle performance clearly indicate her loneliness and downtrodden spirits. Through interactions with her coworkers and flatmates and the looming notion of a job interview for a social care position, we are invited to observe the effects of Aurora’s labour position or her mental and social state.
An obvious touchstone for ON FALLING is Ken Loach’s recent filmography. The film’s workplace has some Venn diagram overlap with Loach’s SORRY WE MISSED YOU, and Loach’s Sixteen Films takes a production credit. As powerful as that film was, Carreira’s is an altogether more subtle affair. Rather than a loud wail of despair, the story builds an escalating sense of dread and being trapped. A wonderfully realised example is Aurora’s palpable urgency to remove herself from small talk, lest her scanner beep at her taking too long to listen to a (non-clock-watched) colleague’s pleasantries about his family. The overbearing eye of the system crushes small niceties.
“As powerful as [SORRY WE MISSED YOU] was, Carreira’s is an altogether more subtle affair. Rather than a loud wail of despair, the story builds an escalating sense of dread and being trapped.”
Aurora initially appears to have a spark of connection with her new Polish housemate, Kris (Piotr Sikora). However, things imposed by her financial and work position stop that bud from flourishing. We see how small gestures like sharing dinner lift Aurora but also how needing her flatmates to pay for her electricity dampens her mood, sapping away some of her dignity. As the film progresses, there is no searing moment where the situation boils over. One scene towards the end perhaps represents some degree of accumulation, but ON FALLING engrossingly and effectively shows the death of Aurora’s optimism and joy by a thousand papercuts. In this regard, the subtlety of Santos’s performance effortlessly elicits empathy and even retains a hint of optimism and resilience by the film’s end.
“ON FALLING demonstrates that when our societal systems are dysfunctional at best and broken at worst, we all lose something: our ability to connect, be joyful, and share in the world.”
ON FALLING isn’t a social realist film which leans into the supposed grimness often implied by the genre (and derisively and unempathetically referred to as ‘poverty porn’). Aurora experiences moments of lightness – a drink with friends, the treat of a payday cake – which make the setbacks she encounters all the more impactful and the metaphorical tide she swims against all the more relentless. Carreira also manages to weave in some more poetic moments; a box rolling down an upwards-moving conveyor belt, stationary in space, is a beautifully Sisyphean metaphor for what Aurora experiences in the film.
ON FALLING demonstrates that when our societal systems are dysfunctional at best and broken at worst, we all lose something: our ability to connect, be joyful, and share in the world. The banal oppression otherwise free people undergo is deftly highlighted within this involving and emotional character tale. ON FALLING is an extraordinarily accomplished feature debut that indicates we have much to anticipate in Carreira’s future work.