Damaged goods

A Geordie family bears the stamp of exploitation in Ken Loach’s latest social commentary.

Job interviews are never pleasant, but you really feel for striving father-oftwo Ricky (Kris Hitchen) when he sits down, deferent and eager, in front of his new boss at the beginning of Sorry We Missed You. As if being inducted into a warped dystopia, he’s told that rather than

being simply hired by this delivery company in Newcastle, he’ll be “onboarded” and henceforth known as a “franchisee” rather than a worker, reimbursed in

“fees” instead of wages. Ricky is given a package scanner, eerily called a “gun”, and schooled in the necessity of hitting “targets”. But the gun is not his – he rents it – and there’ll be hell to pay if anything goes wrong.

This is the warped world of the “gig economy”, chosen by director Ken Loach and writing partner Paul Laverty for their latest polemic, in which language is bent to obscure vicious exploitation. Ricky has no employee rights, no union to which he can turn. But then, the world of precarity is not new to seasoned day labourers such as Ricky.

His wife, Abbie (Debbie Honeywood), knows this, too. She works as a visiting carer for the elderly and disabled, overstretched and barely able to fulfil their basic needs, let alone provide empathy and attention. Under such conditions, even the most resolute family would unravel, and that is precisely what this one does: truant teenage son Seb (Rhys Stone) turns vandal, daughter Liza (Katie Proctor) tries to insert herself between exhausted, warring parents.

Sorry We Missed You is a close companion to Loach’s devastating I, Daniel