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‘On Falling’ Review: An Episode in the Life of a Warehouse Picker, Told With Grace and Urgency
A San Sebastián prizewinner, Laura Carreira's impressive debut 'On Falling' puts faces and lives to the purchases we so impersonally make online.
Where Ken Loach’s recent “Sorry We Missed You” shed light on the loneliness of the long-suffering delivery driver, Laura Carreira ‘s remarkable “ On Falling ” turns warehouse-picking from an ignorable abstract process into a human routine of vivid, slowly erosive despair. As Aurora, a thirtysomething Portuguese woman forging a new life in a drably unspecified Scottish town, she returns the camera’s steady gaze with a hollowed-out stare of her own, her intense inner quiet only sporadically stirred by rare, fleeting grasps at social connection. With patiently building rage, “On Falling” tracks the daily dehumanizing microaggressions of the gig economy — the chiding lectures about missed targets, the Kafkaesque online hurdles required to book a single day off — that ultimately cause Aurora not to break down but to more silently shut down, too exhausted even to cry.
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