‘I just do the usual, I guess…’
I’ve never worked in a workhouse, but I have worked in a care home and more pertinently in a call centre. While the former job had moments of fulfilment amongst the gloom, working in a call centre is a truly soul-destroying endeavour. I know how it feels to dread the sound of the morning alarm clock. While cinema has dealt with the drudgery of low-paid, low-joy jobs since Charlie Chaplin and Modern Times, I can’t recall another film capturing the stark misery of working a job that you hate as accurately as On Falling. It’s a tough watch…
Aurora (Joana Santos) is a Portuguese immigrant working in a warehouse in Scotland. Over the course of 104 minutes we see Aurora gradually broken down by automated systems, unsympathetic bosses and crippling loneliness. There are glimmers of light here and there, but they only serve to make the darkness even more obsidian. The quiet desperation demonstrated here is heart-breaking in its subtlety and first time writer-director Laura Carreira evokes Ken Loach without ever succumbing to the sensationalist sloganeering that has dogged some of his later work (it would be remiss of me, however, not to point out that I love Loach and most of his work).
This is Santos’ first appearance in an English speaking role after a slew of TV work in her native Portugal and she brings a nuanced complexity to Aurora that makes it impossible not to root for her. The fact that she feels doomed for much of the film ensures that On Falling is a tough watch at times, but it is also an authentic depiction of what life is like for thousands of low-paid workers across the UK – immigrant or otherwise.
On Falling is not an uplifting film. It is often unrelentingly bleak. But it provides a voice to a demographic who are too often rendered voiceless. It’s also genuinely powerful and affecting – an underrated gem.
