Anticipation.
Flying the flag for Brit film's elder statesman, Ken Loach.
Enjoyment.
Manual labour is dehumanising. Who knew?
In Retrospect.
Realism that seldom feels realistic.
Heavy duty rope and oversized sex toys are the main products that diligent, mousy item picker Aurora (Joana Santos) has to load into her cart while on the clock for a Scottish fulfilment warehouse. Self-imposed death and the possibility of escape are central themes to Laura Carreira’s strenuously downbeat workplace drama on the dehumanising effects of low-wage labour – it’s a film that puts paid to any viewers who believe that menial factory work is a barrel of laughs.
Our Portuguese expat heroine lives hand-to-mouth in communal lodgings with a gaggle of foreign workers, and the narrative rump of the film involves how having to suddenly shell out to have her phone screen fixed sends her life into economic tailspin. Her fixed income, which we assume covers rent and basics, does not allow for such consumer fripperies, and it’s not long before she’s having to mine-sweep cupcakes from a staff celebration just to prevent from passing out.
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The film successfully cultivates and air of perpetual gloom, as jocular factory staff are seen advising Aurora to “cheer up”, offering cheap chocolate bars as a reward for high productivity, and directing any and all basic HR request to “the app”. And if she’s not pulling the trigger on her scanning gun in a timely fashion, first an alarm rings, and then it’s a visit from the gawky teenage line manager telling her to shape up or ship out.
The film is produced by Ken Loach’s Sixteen Films, and had Carriera’s name not been on the credits you’d be forgiven for thinking that the old rabble rouser himself had made it. In tone it cleaves quite closely to the films Loach has made with screenwriter Paul Laverty, in that political outrage and tabulating the humiliations meted out on the working classes by the unfeeling capitalist machine is often more important than dramatic sophistication or formal creativity. Suffering is the only emotion worth a damn.
While the film pleads with us to pity Aurora and her sorry lot, it does very little to contextualise her dire situation. She apparently has no family or friends, no aspirations beyond securing a paycheque to cover her rent and amenities, and her only life plan is to move into the similarly gruelling and underpaid world of home caring. The urgent need to fix her phone suddenly seems a little hysterical given that her only use for it is to flick through TikTok videos, yet perhaps the suggestion here is that some people reach such depths of chronic depression and loneliness that make-up tutorials and junk food recipes can form a measure of solace.
Santos delivers a committed performance as this hapless lost soul, yet the film is too intent on feathering out its dismal thesis on an existence for which suicide, for many, offers a sweet release.
