Critics reviews

In the Aisles is a triumph of mood, aided by an eclectic soundtrack that skips from Delta blues to electro-pop to Strauss and Donizetti, and a worthy stage for Rogowski to continue introducing himself to an international audience.

While Stuber is certainly not the first filmmaker to find the beauty in the seemingly routine and mundane, more than anything, he finds the humanity in an environment — the customer service field — that, ironically, often is defined by the dehumanization of its employees. And in this particular day and age, the effect of that alone is bracing.

Evoking melancholic wonder, the film’s soundscape stacks pensive narration, classical music, deftly selected English-language tracks, enrapturing sounds of the ocean, and pitch-perfect silences to enliven the faintly colored and oppressively symmetrical spaces sometimes captured as literal cages. Stuber repeatedly reaps the beauty of the stylistically economical choices he sowed.

Thomas Stuber’s In the Aisles (2018) trains its patient gaze on what you might expect to be a mind-numbing job in a soul-killing environment—stacking shelves in a huge, Costco-like wholesale market—and reveals grace, dignity, and submerged but powerful currents of emotion.

“In the Aisles” feels somewhat attenuated; at a full two hours, it’d be meager indeed if it weren’t for performers artfully building the romantic tension throughout.

There are some funny scenes... But “In the Aisles” is hardly a comedy. The subtext of spousal abuse, coupled with a tragic fate that befalls one of the store’s workers, lends the film, by Thomas Stuber, a melancholy tone bordering on the morose.

While Stuber’s film acknowledges the soul-sucking nature of these colorless environs—at times, the enormous yet empty aisles resemble a ripe setting of an after-hours zombie apocalypse—the filmmaker loves his characters so much that he can’t help but prioritize their humanity that rises above the surface of it all.

The closest analogue to “In the Aisles” might be the bleakly comic films of the Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki (“The Other Side of Hope”), with which this movie shares a taste for deadpan sight gags and an interest in everyday working-class lives. But imagine a Kaurismaki with less humor and a slower pace, and you’ll have a sense of how singular yet insubstantial “In the Aisles” ultimately appears.

By subverting the impulse to indulge a winning romance between its two bright European stars, In the Aisles insists on the dignity of its appealing but rather thin characters.

It's less a portrait of modern malaise than of the filmmakers' longing for meaning in an increasingly corporate world. Such assumptions amount to little more than yet another casual dismissal of those who are often deemed unworthy of notice.

In the Aisles is a movie on that overwhelmingly important but rarely filmed subject: work... In the Aisles is a poignant and richly sympathetic film.

As sweet and surprisingly amusing as it is despite its low-key tone, In The Aisles is not without problems... But overall, In The Aisles is a quietly charming romantic comedy that manages to stay sweet despite some of the darker material it presents. Go for the melancholic charm, stay for the forklift jokes.