It speaks well of the tolerance of the Scottish people that this film by the Portuguese born director Laura Carreira hasn’t provoked flag burnings and protests outside that country’s consulate. It is forty five minutes before we see evidence that there might be natural light in Scotland and an hour before we see daylight. We learn quickly that it rains a lot, is bloody cold and the food looks awful. It is easy to understand why Joana Santos’ character Aurora is in a state of permanent joylessness even before we take account of how she makes a living. The Scotland she has moved to from Portugal offers only artificial light, darkness or dusk most of the time.

This should be the film that finally gets you round to cancelling your Amazon account and buying the things you need in shops where people interact with each other. Aurora works in a nameless warehouse as a picker spending endless hours walking around with a trolley and a small scanner putting things in a basket. My impression was that Scottish consumers seem to buy a lot of sex toys online.

Work of this sort is as solitary as anything in the history of industry. Each shift is a race to keep up with a pace determined by management. Carreira doesn’t caricature them as utterly villainous. Aurora gets a gentle reminder to up her pace on one occasion and is rewarded with a bar of cheap chocolate on another. Neither of these  are quite as demeaning as the random drug tests she and her colleagues are forced to take to earn their £12.60 or £15.95 an hour, assuming her anonymous online retailer has similar terms and policies to Amazon.

On Falling is from Sixteen Films, Ken Loach’s stable and it shares his sensibility in its portrayal of some of the most exploited parts of the working class. Aurora’s Polish and Spanish flatmates are all over thirty working in the service sector and sharing a house which has had every room turned into a bedroom. They keep their food in personal cupboards and are advised to hide the valuable stuff. Their chances of finding a decent place of their own to live are non-existent. There was a time when lots of people started their working lives in the same way as Aurora. Her generation’s tragedy is that this is how their working lives will always be, living in overcrowded accommodation, earning just enough to get buy and used as human robots until they can be replaced by real ones.

Do not expect a rousing happy ending where the workers seize control of the means of production. The only moment of real joy comes when there is an outage, and the warehouse is shut down for just long enough to let the pickers feel like human beings.

On a linguistic note, I was delighted to hear the use of “boggin’” when a group of drunk Scottish women eating chips say of their friend who has lost her shoes that “her feet will be boggin’”. That is the sort of phrase should be in language primers for new arrivals.