MOVIE: On Falling (2024)
Added 2025-08-07 14:43:12 +0000 UTCAbout a woman from Portugal living in Scotland.
Directorial debut by Laura Carreira, starring Joana Santos.
Give it a watch if you haven't and pick a couple things to taste in the comments for communal nourishment.
Describe it as it is before explaining what its About, and talk about more than whether or not you liked it.
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This movie brought back a lot of vivid memories of being in a very different place in life. Familiar depictions of Scottish society, including some frustrating bits about it. Honest and tender expression of The Moment.
I'll hop in the comments alongside yall. Lets chat.
Comments
When she went to the kitchen to pretend to get a glass of water just to try to find a connection (twice) I felt that. There are no folk songs in phone world.
Lou Corben
2025-08-17 22:37:35 +0000 UTCi watched the movie last night and am only commenting now so i’m sorry if things aren’t clear or well formulated i love how the movie just let the work scenes go on and on and on—-i wouldn’t be surprised if a large chunk of the movie was just her working (intentionally so)—- I also loved how’d they’d let scenes where shit just doesn’t go her way like drag on… it really wanted the viewer to sit in and boil alive with her in these moments of just pure miasma and dread—-and i hated it! but the fact that i felt those feelings so palpably is a testament to its effectiveness. It did make me reflect on my own life rn in a lot of ways—-and I think at times my unease came less from dread and more from lowkey like… regret to an extent? or maybe even shame for seeing myself within her experiences—-which is kinda sad! she nor i should feel shame but alas… a life in isolation is barely a life at all. every scene where she was smiling ear to ear involved her getting breaks from isolation. capitalism actively incentivizes workplaces to function as we see in the movie—-what matters at the end of the day is whether the line goes up, and that’s almost always at the cost of the workers… invaluable yet ever replaceable—-the reality under the surface of it all is that frankly profits do not matter—-that last scene is what matters… your work is not your life—-i think your life is your community, and when you are interacting with others—-that is living! a quote that always sticks with me is from Ross Gay’s “The Book of Delights” (it’s long but i feel it’s relevant and really worth sending in its entirety) “among the most beautiful things i’ve ever heard anyone say came from my student Bethany, talking about her pedagogical aspirations or ethos and how she wanted to be as a teacher, and what she wanted her classrooms to be: “What if we joined out wildernesses together?” Sit with that for a minute. That the body, the life, might carry a wilderness, an unexplored territory, and that yours and mine might somewhere, somehow, meet. Might, even, join. And what if the wilderness——perhaps the densest wild in there——thickets, bogs, swamps, uncrossable ravines and rivers—-is our sorrow? Or, the “intolerable.” It astonishes me sometimes——no, often——how every person i get to know——everyone, regardless of everything, by which i mean *everything*——lives with some profound personal sorrow. Brother addicted. Mother murdered. Dad died in surgery. Rejected by their family. Cancer came back. Evicted. Fetus not okay. Everyone, regardless, always, of everything: about to mention the existential sorrow we all might be affected with, which is that we, and what we love, will soon be annihilated. Which sounds more dramatic than it might. Let me just say dead. Is this, sorrow, of which our impending being no more might be the foundation, the great wilderness? Is this sorrow the true wild? And if it is——and if we join them—— your wild to mine——what’s that? For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation. What if we joined our sorrows, i’m saying. I’m saying: What if that is joy?” when she was with the drunk girl, when she talked to the coworker who passed away, when the man found her in the park, or even the interaction with the makeup teller—-all these scenes are cases where there was this weird… exchanging of sorrows that resulted in a semblance of joy—it’s kind of paradoxically beautiful to me, but I am on the younger side. the whole movie was grounded in an oppressive realism that felt at times as if it would suffocate me in banality (in a good way)—-and the moment that felt most “unreal” was the end—-and isn’t that almost sad? I think the ending is the only thing that IS “real!”the energy within the building at that moment—-thoughts, memories, and the present all being shared in a way they just couldn’t quite manage to do naturally throughout the film. (the joining of their wildernesses) I think the ending shows that the barrier between that “realness” is artificial—-less than artificial, its permeable—-malleable even. We’ve been unwillingly co-opted into this faux social contract and convinced ourselves it’s innate to reality—-but what makes any of it real to begin with has always been the people and the connections between us. Our “authenticity” lies beyond established job culture.
Madeline McTavish
2025-08-12 14:24:08 +0000 UTC
