A clear-eyed vision from the stalwart of social realism
Sorry We Missed You 15 cert, 101 min
Dir Ken Loach
Starring Kris Hitchen, Debbie Honeywood, Rhys Stone, Katie Proctor, Ross Brewster
The early word on the new Ken Loach film was that the 83-year-old stalwart of social realism had turned his attentions towards the gig economy. In fact, it has turned out to be about something even more far-reaching and disturbing than that: the terrifying gig-economisation by stealth of everyday life.
Sorry We Missed You finds Loach at his most insightful and clear-eyed – cinema’s most venerable anatomist of British working-class life once again taking up his scalpel to diagnose some new malady and enumerate its symptoms and causes. It is delivered with the righteous moral punch that we expect of Loach, but with little to none of the finger-wagging dialogue and hard-luck plot contrivances that can make his characters seem less like human beings than vessels for a political message.
It is a much better film than his shock 2016 Palme d’or winner I, Daniel Blake, though both films share key collaborators, including screenwriter Paul Laverty, composer George Fenton and cinematographer Robbie Ryan.
Kris Hitchen plays Ricky Turner, a Newcastle father-of-two who turns to delivery driving in an attempt to scrape together a mortgage deposit. He and his wife Abbie (Debbie Honeywood) were ready to buy a decade ago, but Northern Rock’s collapse put paid to that, and they have been renting ever since – an existence Loach presents as a kind of zero-hours version of domestic stability.
Ricky’s supervisor at the depot, Maloney (Ross Brewster), talks a lot about choices and self-employment, and throws around some progressive-sounding jargon: rather than being hired, Ricky is “onboarded”. But when work begins, everything looks suspiciously like old-fashioned factory-floor graft, with Maloney as the tyrannical foreman and the supposedly self-employed drivers scurrying around following orders.
Yet the perks of employment – stability, comradeship, sane hours, provision of materials, time off in an emergency – are nowhere to be seen. Even Abbie’s work as a carer is on a zero-hours basis, which leaves her zigzagging from dawn to dusk between “clients” (rather than patients) on the bus, while parenting by mobile phone. Parcel by parcel, client by client, the film reveals the regime to be a cup-and-ball con trick.
This unstable working life destabilises home life in turn, which Loach and his cast dramatise movingly and persuasively, thanks in part to the terrific, unselfconscious performances from newcomers Rhys Stone and Katie Proctor as Ricky and Abbie’s teenage son Seb and 11-year-old daughter Liza. Because everyday problems can’t dependably be solved by bedtime, they’re allowed to fester into crises, building to a final shot that has a heart-freezing power and resonance.
Yet there’s much warmth here, too, in the detailed and plausible mesh of family relationships and also Ricky’s fleeting doorstep encounters while on his rounds. One man in a Newcastle top cheerfully berates him for being a Manchester United fan, dredges up decade-old defeats and tells him to f--- off. It’s the nicest thing anyone says to him all day.