Film reviews: Mickey 17 | On Falling

On Falling (15) ★★★★☆

With his new film Mickey 17, Oscar-winning Parasite director Bong Joon-ho returns to the broadly satirical sci-fi territory of Snowpiercer and Okja — with an emphasis on the “broad”. Set in a nearish future, it stars Robert Pattinson as Mickey Barnes, a debt-riddled loser whose desperation to escape his murderous creditors leads him to blithely sign up to be an “expendable” — a space explorer whose body can be regenerated with his memories intact whenever he dies on the job. Effectively a living crash-test dummy, he’s used by the scientists of a colonisation mission to harvest information about the effects on the body of excessive radiation, airborne viruses and the like as they prepare to take over an ice-covered planet rich in minerals.

Mickey has already died 16 times when the film opens and we soon learn the cloning technology has been banned on Earth, making him somewhat unique. Nevertheless, his fellow crew members only really give him the time of day when they want to know what it’s like to die and even the scientists are getting a little blasé about his presence, viewing him as a dataset, not a person. But after being left for dead following an encounter with a colony of indigenous tentacled creatures, Mickey 17 returns to the ship only to be confronted by his replacement, Mickey 18 (also Pattinson), whose first instinct is to kill him because so-called “multiples” have been declared illegal.

Here, the film raises an intriguing philosophical point as Mickey 17 realises that if he dies now, that’s it, any future version will build on Mickey 18’s memories, not his. Sadly, after setting this up, the film doesn’t bother exploring this existential dilemma, resorting instead to farcical satire that makes obvious points about late-period capitalism’s ruthless contempt for human labour and takes some groaning swings at Trump-style demagoguery via Mark Ruffalo’s over-the-top turn as a failing-upwards politician whose disingenuous religious affiliations have made him the cult-like leader of this expedition.

None of which is all that out of step with Bong’s oeuvre and perhaps there’s something to be said for a film that goes this broad at a time when our daily political reality has become a terrifying clown show. Yet the film’s bluntness — and Pattinson’s gurning performance — does get a little wearying. If winning an Oscar grants you one “Get Out of Jail Free” card to do whatever you want, it seems a shame Bong Joon-ho has blown his on this.

A more humane and pointed exploration of the daily grind of the gig economy can be found in On Falling, Edinburgh-based Portuguese filmmaker Laura Carreira’s textured portrait of a “picker” at an Amazon-style warehouse whose mental health starts slowly unravelling due to the cumulative stress of the job. Played by Joana Santos, this is Aurora, a young Portuguese immigrant to Scotland who spends her long days diligently stalking the aisles and fulfilling online orders, her every move tracked and timed and patronisingly rewarded with bonus sweeties if she does well. It’s one of the grimmer ironies that such warehouses are called “fulfilment centres”; for the employees they’re anything but, and the unspoken truth is that all the data being collected on Aurora for efficiency purposes will inevitably be used to fully automate her job in the not-too-distant future (something glimpsed in the recent Baby Girl).

Outside of work we see Aurora’s life is one of quiet desperation too. Because she can’t really afford her lodgings and never has enough food to sate her hunger, she has to approach her life with a similar kind of spirit-crushing caution just to get by. When an older, well-meaning colleague jokes that the problem with the younger generation is that they’re not out there having a good time, she just smiles politely and gets back to work. What else can she say?

We sense she’s nearing breaking point through the confident way Carreira eschews melodrama in favour of this kind of close observation of Aurora and her response to a world in which her co-workers’ main points of connection are the streaming shows they’re watching or the money issues they’re having. She also lets her images do the talking, underscoring the Sisyphean struggle of Aurora’s job with a chilling shot of a tumbling cardboard package going nowhere on a conveyor belt and capturing the job’s dehumanising effect with a subtly horrific shot of a school kid on a class trip unthinkingly treating Aurora like an animal in a zoo.

But for all that On Falling is a timely and incisive on-the-ground portrait of the true cost of convenience, Carreira is good too at capturing the small moments of joy and human kindness that remind us that this isn’t all there is. This a powerful debut, a deceptively quiet protest against humanity’s marginalisation.

Mickey 17 and On Falling are in cinemas from 7 March