On Falling (2024)

Europe’s White “Outsider”

Portuguese director Laura Carreira’s debut feature film On Falling tells the unseen anatomy of Europe’s new working class through a quiet yet strikingly perceptive social realist lens.
The protagonist, Aurora, is a migrant worker who has moved from Portugal to Scotland. This position places her on the border of “the Other,” both economically and culturally. The truest White European has always othered those she perceives as less European. On Falling is not merely a story of individual isolation, but also a film that throws in our faces the invisible burdens of modern working life. A foreign language, temporary contracts, rented rooms, limited friendships. The workers blurred by digital capitalism… The film is a bare yet deeply unsettling story of this new order in which Europe quietly others its own white working class.

In recent years, European cinema has chosen to portray the issue of class not from the outside, but from within — through the ordinary spaces of everyday life and the invisible forms of labor. This new wave silently continues Ken Loach’s legacy; yet young directors like Carreira renew it by transforming his direct political tone into minimalist observation. On Falling, produced by the same producer behind Loach’s I, Daniel Blake and The Old Oak, establishes both a thematic and productive continuity: while defending the dignity of labor, it now focuses on the inner world of a woman on a micro scale.

Aurora, the Portuguese woman, has become an “internal migrant” in Scotland, reduced to cheap labor — othered not by her color but by her origin. Carreira depicts this new form of exploitation, in which Europe quietly excludes its own people, with a simple, cold, and humane language — painting the portrait of an era where otherness is defined no longer by skin but by geography. The idea of whiteness as privilege collapses; Carreira links “otherness” not to skin color but to economic vulnerability.

Laura Carreira’s political instinct is razor-sharp. She chooses to narrate “being the Other” not through racial foundations but through economic exploitation within Europe. For this reason, On Falling departs from classical migration cinema; Aurora is neither Black nor Asian — she is the “white Other.” What Carreira reveals is that Europe has begun creating new “colonies” from within: colonies of bodies that are legally equal but economically worthless.

Aurora works as an order picker in a warehouse belonging to a supply chain, racing against time in a way that recalls Modern Times; the conveyor belt of that era has now been replaced by digital scanners. In these cold, gray corridors where loneliness is organized more than solidarity, and labor is stripped of humanity, Aurora too serves a mechanical existence. On Falling shows that migration is not only about making a living, but also an experience woven with social disconnection, loss of identity, and inner solitude. The weight of trying to exist in a foreign language, being trapped in a narrow social circle, and losing one’s sense of belonging reverberates through Aurora’s silence.

Though her name means “light,” “hope,” and “renewal” — the brightness just before sunrise — Aurora never sees daylight due to her long working hours; she goes to work in the pitch dark and returns in the pitch dark. Her name is light, but she herself remains in darkness. This irony symbolizes the collapse of Europe’s own Enlightenment myth. She is no longer the goddess of dawn, but a worker of an age that has lost its light. Through this irony, Carreira makes visible the dark face of “welfare Europe”; the ideal of progress is no longer bound to sunlight, but to the dim power of fluorescent bulbs. Trapped in this warehouse, Aurora lives among exhausting shifts, fleeting breaks filled with phone scrolling, and monotonous conversations where no one meets another’s gaze.

This system is a grotesque reflection of modern Europe’s work culture, which has transformed into the gig economy: insecurity masked by the rhetoric of “flexibility” operates through Aurora’s body. The worker is no longer an individual but a temporary function, a unit of algorithmic productivity. Giorgio Agamben’s concept of Homo Sacer darkens this picture even further: Aurora is no longer a citizen but a biological process managed by the system. As Agamben says, “the crisis of modernity is the reduction of life to something that must merely be kept alive.” Aurora’s existence is the cinematic embodiment of that statement. Europe still sanctifies life — but no one asks anymore what that life actually looks like.

At first, the story seems to be about a lonely migrant woman; but over time, she transforms into a figure whose identity and subjectivity have dissolved within the system. Aurora works silently, at the pace that pleases her superiors, and follows all the rules — she is perfectly shaped for the system. Yet as the film progresses, Aurora begins a “fall,” the one the film is named after. This fall is not only physical: for Aurora, whose life consists solely of working, existence becomes a Sisyphean struggle. Belonging gives way to transience, labor to mechanical repetition, community to loneliness; her identity slowly erodes. What she experiences is not only physical exhaustion, but also an existential suspension. Cinematographer Karl Kurten turns the warehouse into a labyrinth, perfectly reflecting the inner world of a person lost within a mechanical order. Aurora’s body becomes both a tool of production and the silent face of exploitation in this new European regime.

In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt argues that the world modern man builds through labor is also the trap that destroys his freedom. Aurora recalls Arendt’s animal laborans — the “working animal”: a being that produces only to live, yet loses its humanity in that very production. Arendt emphasizes that reducing the worker to a mechanical labor force is capitalism’s ideological trap; because in this way, one preserves not freedom, but merely the capacity to survive. Hence, the sphere of labor is where freedom is possible in its narrowest form. Aurora’s presence in the warehouse embodies this thought: she works constantly but makes no decisions, produces but remains invisible — an animal laborans.

Within this biopolitical order, the most painful motif is the rope. The recurring rope orders Aurora receives are silent signals of a world in which the desire to live has long been extinguished. These orders are not merely product requests but tangible traces of humanity’s loss of faith in its own existence. Each one resembles a record of invisible despair, belonging to an age where no one knows why life continues. At first, these orders do not catch Aurora’s attention; but when she senses that people might be ordering them to escape the weight of living, she shows a quiet act of resistance. A small but meaningful gesture.

Throughout the film, Carreira uses her camera not as a tool of observation but as an instrument of diagnosis; with clinical composure, she exposes the uprooted existence of modern humanity and quietly dismantles the comfortable distance of the white European viewer.

On Falling is the silent scream of contemporary Europe; the story of an individual lost in the hum of production, progress, and prosperity. In Aurora’s silence, Carreira seems to hear the exhaustion of an entire era; the film compels the viewer to confront not only the fragility of a worker’s existence, but of modern humanity itself. Thus, On Falling is not merely a social realist film, but also a mirror in which Europe faces its own conscience. Aurora’s fall is not the collapse of an individual — it is the silent downfall of a civilization.

Berrin Okçu