Sorry We Missed You: Ken Loach’s Latest Explores Dark Side of Gig Economy

By Liam Lacey

Rating: A-

What kind of film is Sorry We Missed You? Intimate social realism? A message movie? A call to action? Let’s just acknowledge it for what it is: Loach World. This is a place of working-class people, who speak in local dialects you don’t hear much on TV, who struggle to do cling together, to have friends and family, to fight against immense economic and political forces.

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Sorry We Missed You is the 25th feature film from 83-year-old director Ken Loach, a drama that distills political and personal struggle down to a few austere elements. Ricky (Kris Hitchen), a former Newcastle builder and gardener who has never really recovered from the 2008 economic slump, takes a job for a fictional postal delivery service. His contractor, Maloney (Ross Brewster), a large bald man with the physique of a pro wrestler, promises he’ll be the “master of his own destiny” with his own business, a gig that “sorts the fucking losers from the warriors.”

“You don’t get hired here; you come onboard. We like to call it onboarding,” he says. “You don’t work for us. You work with us.”

Read our interview with Ken Loach

All of this, of course, it’s a con. Ricky convinces his wife, Abbie (Debbie Honeywood), a care worker, to sell her car so he can put a down-payment on a used van. Soon, he’s chained to a scanner that tracks his every movement. To keep up with the pace required to make a living wage, he works six days a week, sun-up to sun-down. On the recommendation of a co-worker, he carries a plastic bottle to piss in. Abbie, forced to rely on public transit, is working longer hours as well. Their perfect 11-year-old Lisa Jane (Katie Proctor) starts wetting the bed; the bright, questioning 15-year-old Seb (Rhys Stone) starts skipping school and vandalizing buildings with graffiti.

Screenwriter Paul Laverty — who did extensive research including ride-alongs with Amazon delivery men — offers a sort of dramatized journalism. It is, no doubt, didactic, which is not necessarily negative (learning is good) though sometimes dominos do seem to fall in a too-predictable direction. (Will a kid go missing? Of course, a kid will go missing). In the character of Maloney, a self-styled “Patron Saint of Nasty Bastards” is an improbably shameless defender of the new exploitation economy, doing his Geordie working-class version of Gordon Gecko’s “greed is good.”

Yet, what is depicted on screen is not just plausible but painfully familiar in world where many people are living by the thinnest of economic margins. Loach’s method is to shoot in chronological order, not revealing the script to the cast until they shoot their scenes.

The mostly non-professional cast do a credible job of depicting a family growing progressively more anxious under increasing pressure. The story’s too familiar to be called suspenseful: Get sick, get robbed or have a run-in with the law and that flimsy construction known as “family life” can collapse like a paper cup under a boot heel.

Sorry We Missed You. Directed by Ken Loach. Written by Paul Laverty. Starring Kris Hitchen, Debbie Honeywood, Rhys Stone, Katie Proctor and Ross Brewster. Opens Friday, March 6 at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox as well as in Vancouver, Victoria, Calgary, Waterloo, Hamilton, March 13 in Edmonton, Saskatoon, Regina, Kingston, and April 17 in Ottawa.