‘On Falling’: San Sebastian Review

Dir/scr. Laura Carreira. UK/Portugal. 2024. 104mins

Films about migrant alienation, especially those set on the cold automated factory floor, can be grimly authentic to the point where the audience itself is also cut adrift. For her feature debut, Laura Carreira, working with Ken Loach’s Sixteen Films, proves herself an empathetic inheritor of his mantle with an enveloping portrait of loneliness which doesn’t ask for pity or outrage. Aurora (Joana Santos, excellent), a young ‘picker’ in a giant fulfilment warehouse in Scotland, comes from Portugal, but she could be any lonely soul who has tried to break past the prison of small talk into a deeper human connection. Her hesitant, faltering attempts are heightened by the lack of money or prospects that leads to a life on the precipice. On Falling is the risk of her daily existence.

 An  intense, enveloping experience

Carreira, an Edinburgh resident and Portuguese native whose accomplished shorts including The Shift give a clear sign as to the warming flame of her social conscience, premiered this first feature at TIFF before competing at San Sebastián. Although it’s formally of some interest (tight close-ups in a boxy frame, ambient sound only, some street casting) On Falling is more daring in its juggling of emotions over a restrained run-time, always clinging to a quiet determination to put the viewer inside one lonely, little life, and all the high risks and hopes that brings. There is every reason for excitement about Laura Carreira’s future.

Presumably conceived in pre-Brexit times when Portuguese migrants had far fewer hurdles to jump to get as far as a Scottish fulfillment centre, On Falling travels the same terrain as fellow Portugese director Marto Martin’s tough, dour Great Yarmouth: Provisional Figures (which also competed at San Sebastián). Like Loach, though, Carreira wants to reach a wider audience. Far less blunt than Loach’s more recent work with Paul Laverty, which has sometimes betrayed the more didactic tone of older film-makers who know time is running out, On Falling will be of note to art house crowds looking for a new social realist champion.

Yet providing a credible social realist context while still producing cinematic highs and lows is a tough challenge. Carrera initially answers it inside the giant fulfilment centre, where goods are packed randomly to keep pickers alert (the production claims authenticity, and there’s no reason to suspect otherwise). It’s as if Nomadland had no friendly van at the end of the day. We start with Aurora and her little automatic reader machine which impatiently beeps if she takes too long to find an item, yet could be the most responsive thing in her life. She carpools with another Portugese colleague, and shares a building with strangers who come and go in a kitchen and life devoid of natural light. 

Any small talk Aurora encounters is both excruciating and impossible to break through: she is starving for a connection, which might come when a friendly Polish ‘man with a van’ moves into the house, although Aurora has almost lost the ability to speak through her loneliness. A colleague at the centre who makes a friendly overture disappears and is said to have committed suicide, all but immobilising her in terror. Any time she dares to make a tentative move outside the radius of her mobile phone the moment is brushed away – Carreira makes you understand how huge those fleeting opprortunities are for a woman who is so alone. There’s no attempt to provide Aurora with a back-story or a family at home in, say, Lisbon, which is a strong statement for Carreira as a writer, to box the character so firmly into her screen. Breaking that phone brings Aurora close to the edge: paying for a repair means she now has no money at all. A slight stumble could crush her completely.

Carreira gives us a Scotland which is only really glimpsed by night – in the ladies’ toilets at a club, where a woman slumps insensibly on Aurora’s shoulder, or a chip shop when a hen night arrives in to crowd noisily around her. Yet there’s never a breakthrough. The chance of an interview to become a care worker, deemed low-paid and -status in the UK, is everything to her. It’s here where Carreira ratchets up the stakes, and allows the light to shine on a cake shop on payday. 

Thanks to the tight team-work between Carreira and her intuitive lead actor, On Falling will grow to become an intense, enveloping experience. Few won’t remember some time in their lives where they were as locked out as Aurora, although not so many will have experienced the risks of being a strange person in such a strange land. It’s good to remember, because the situation Carreira paints so vividly certainly doesn’t belong to the past.