Portuguese immigrant Aurora (Joana Santos) works is a drab warehouse somewhere in cold and grey Scotland. Her job consists of fours movements repeated ad infinitum: she scans a shelf, she then scans an item on the shelf, places the item on a trolley, and then finally scans the trolley. She moves forward to the next shelf and does exactly the same. The purpose of this procedure is never entirely clear. Perhaps not even Aurora herself understands the machinations of the technology behind her soul-destroyingly monotonous task. It doesn’t matter. As long as she carry on undaunted, everything else is fine.

Aurora is your average 30-something woman. She is neither stupid nor unpleasant. She speaks good English and possesses satisfactory social skills. It is never clear why she moved to the UK, and how she ended up trapped in the unforgiving gig economy. Despite her perceptible loneliness and alienation, she exhibits no desire to break away from the system. She is comfortably stuck in a rut. A box rolling on a conveyor belt without moving forward neatly symbolises her work and her predicament: listless, thankless and inescapable. A modern-day Sisyphus, the boulder replaced with a much smaller, lighter and more sophisticated handheld scan machine.

Her abode is scarcely liberating. Aurora lives in a large house share, with a communal kitchen, shower and bathroom. She befriends her gregarious Polish flatmate Kris (Piotr Sikora). They enjoy a tender sense of complicity and solidarity: they are both immigrants seeking little moments of happiness. Aurora tries it, yet she fails to make friends in the one evening out she allows herself go out drinking. What about romance? Not a spark. An existence so dull surely must preclude something as exciting and turbulent as love.

The fragile harmony of the household is compromised by a mysterious food thief, who operates in the small hours. These people enjoy little privacy. Aurora is interrupted in the middle of the shower as the electricity goes down. Someone forgot to top up the metre. Everything is vaguely chaotic and yet strangely stable. This is relatively safe environment. Somewhere Aurora can recharge her batteries before she resumes her immutable job the following day.

Differently from the protagonist of Ken Loach’s recent social realist classic Sorry We Missed You (2019), Aurora’s predicament is never excruciating. There is no family drama, and no major conflict to overcome. Instead, she internalises her suffering and carries on with work, just like the exemplary neoliberal pawn should. She even earns a chocolate bar for being the “picker of the week”. She can select the sweet of her choice from a.basket containing a variety of scrumptious goods. Such a generous employer! And there is no big catharsis. Aurora never protests against the system that imprisons her, as the lead of I, Daniel Blake (2016), also by Loach. Her rebellious streaks are barely perceptible, expressed in the micro gestures: sneaking to the toilet with some cupcakes in the middle of a corporate talk is as subversive as it gets. Sixteen Films produced all three films.

On Falling is a palpably real movie. It neither romanticises nor fetishises its protagonist. And it never slips into didacticism. Aurora’s quiet tragedy is an all-too-familiar one, and precisely for that reason it’s particularly scary. A highly humanistic little film, with a very subtle and yet profoundly touching denouement. One that will stay with you for some time.

On Falling premieres in the Discovery Section of the Toronto International Film Festival (Tiff). It is also in Competition at the San Sebastian International Film Festival. The UK premiere takes place in October at the BFI London Film Festival.