On Falling

On Falling follows Aurora, a young Portuguese woman living in Edinburgh, Scotland, who works as a picker in a vast Amazon-style warehouse fulfilment centre. The film spans roughly one week, observing her daily rhythms: commutes, long shifts under sickly fluorescent lighting that erases any sense of day or night, and evenings spent in solitary flatshare rooms. Aurora is managed by algorithm — her handheld scanner beeps if she takes too long between picks, and supervisors know her by ID number rather than name, rewarding exceptional performance with nothing more than chocolate. An early, passing mention of a co-worker's unexplained death briefly tilts the film toward psychological thriller territory, but the story deliberately refuses that pivot, remaining resolutely in the register of accumulating small indignity. Aurora longs for connection yet consistently retreats from it, distracted by her phone during moments when colleagues reach out. She and a friend talk wistfully about office jobs with regular hours and stable salaries. Financial precarity is rendered in fine-grained detail: she borrows shampoo when she cannot afford her own, and lies politely about hobbies like travel and karaoke because those pleasures are effectively closed off to her. A recurring visual motif — a cardboard box tumbling backward on an upward conveyor belt, making no progress — encapsulates her Sisyphean position. The film is not without warmth: small acts of kindness from co-workers punctuate the alienation. The emotional arc resolves not through escape but through a moment of unguarded honesty during a job interview, where Aurora's suppressed distress finally breaks the surface — a metaphorical 'falling' that paradoxically represents the possibility of reconnecting with her own identity.

Sources: Wikipedia, BFI Sight & Sound review, Loud and Clear Reviews