Sorry we missed you

UK 2019

Dir: Ken Loach

97 mins

Cast: Kris Hitchen, Debbie Honeywood, Rhys Mcgowan 

Rating: MA15+

Ken Loach is in blistering form with this gripping indictment of the modern gig economy.

It was only ten years ago, with 2009’s larky Looking for Eric,  that Ken Loach was able to show us a man delivering letters and parcels whose workplace was a refuge for him – a place of camaraderie and solidarity in an otherwise troubled life. It’s almost the reverse in his latest, a damning and far darker film. Whenever family life in Newcastle looks to be coming together for Ricky (Kris Hitchen), a Salford-born delivery driver for a private parcels firm, and his wife, Abby (Debbie Honeywood), a carer, it’s the world of work that crushes them and pushes them ever closer to breaking point. ...

And that title, Sorry We Missed You: of course it’s the faux-friendly message left on doorsteps everywhere by parcel delivery firms. But here it also nods to the left behind, to the overlooked, to the forgotten. Loach and his team, including the writer Paul Laverty, demonstrated a new urgency in their work with 2016’s I, Daniel Blake. You can feel it again with this powerful, bleak film that feels acutely of the moment but also carries within it the same question that Loach has been asking for more than 50 years: does life really have to be like this? 

Dave Calhoun, Time Out

It’s difficult to imagine a more socially engaged or powerful condemnation of the exploitative gig economy than Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You, which places the viewer on the ground with an English family trudging through the muck left behind by the erosion of workers’ rights in Europe. Here, the supposed economy of free choice promulgated by neoliberal policies manifests as a domestic realm in which one’s job penetrates into every waking moment, leaving stressed bodies and minds with no time and little wherewithal for a personal life or obligations. Global forces control the fate of the family at the story’s center, in ways not immediately apparent on the individual or family level. As Ricky (Kris Hitchen) plaintively puts it late in the film, “It just seems to me that everything is out of wack.” ...

The characters, each wearied by the constant stress of this economy, are played with an understated realism that’s startling in the context of the typical melodrama through which poverty and social crises are usually addressed. To Loach, social problems cannot be distilled into melodrama’s abstractions, as the dignity in labor and life slipping out of the characters’ worlds stems from their material conditions, not from inner psychological states or idealist values. One could describe Loach’s depiction of the disintegration of this working-class family unit as emotionally devastating—and it absolutely is—but to leave it there would be to miss the point. Sorry We Missed You sounds a clarion call, an enraged outcry for action against the morally bankrupt forces that have robbed the working classes of their hard-won rights.

Pat brown, Slant