Director: Laura Carreira

Stars: Joana Santos, Inês Vaz, Piotr Sikora, Neil Leiper

Portuguese Scotland-based filmmaker Carreira makes an impressive directorial debut with this unsettling exploration of modern work culture. Aurora (Santos, excellent) is a young Portuguese woman working at a vast online delivery warehouse or wryly titled ‘fulfilment centre’ in an unnamed Scottish town, scanning items to be delivered. She struggles to make any connections, only exchanging the occasional word with her equally overworked colleagues. Her domestic life - she shares a flat with other immigrant workers - provides little in the way of comfort either, other than the bland exchanges they have about what streaming shows they are watching. When amiable Polish taxi driver (Sikora) moves in and invites Aurora to the pub, she quickly accepts, underlining her desperation to make any kind of connection. Cinematographer Karl Kürten shoots the exteriors under an oppressive cloud of shadows and drizzle and the warehouse interiors, in a drab grey, in a dourly effective study of the atomising effects of contemporary life. Chinks of light are permitted though, via some mordant humour in which staff are rewarded/infantilised with cupcakes for their efforts, and the darkly comic bureaucratic nightmare of booking off a single day.

David Willoughby

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