Review: Sorry We Missed You (2019)

Ken Loach’s latest kitchen sink drama, Sorry We Missed You, plays like a horror movie where the monster is capitalism. It showcases the agonizing existence of living with precarious work and trying to keep one’s head above waters in the process. If that sounds didactic, it’s because it is. Over a career that has spanned five decades, the English filmmaker has never apologized for the leftist political angle of his filmmaking. With most filmmakers, I’d be wary of such didacticism, but Loach is a storyteller first and foremost, with a deep well of sympathy for his characters; the political outrage is more an honest byproduct of that sympathy for people in difficult circumstances than a manufactured political message. Thus, Loach’s class solidarity is on full display in Sorry We Missed You, but the characters are not reduced to caricatures in order for Loach to convey his political message.

The film follows the working class Turner family living in Newcastle. Ricky (Kris Hitchen) is a jack-of-all-trades and Abbie (Debbie Honeywood) is a caregiver for the disabled and elderly. They’re still suffering the economic aftereffects of the 2008 financial crisis, when they lost the mortgage on a new home, and pine for a place to call their own more than anything. To make enough money to put a down payment on a house, Ricky buys into a franchise for a delivery company owned by the tough-minded Maloney (Ross Brewster). At first Ricky is working long hours but making good money, but all it takes is one little slip-up—in this case, troubles caused by Ricky and Abbie’s truant son, Seb (Rhys Stone)—for problems to start snowballing and the promise of the Turner family’s new life to fade away.

Although the story doesn’t focus on Uber or Airbnb or any of the other big names in the “gig economy,” it’s not hard to see how Ricky and Abbie’s lives are affected by the absence of hard-and-fast employment and regular work hours. For instance, Seb is arrested for shoplifting and one of his parents has to come get him at the police station for him to avoid a permanent charge on his record. Thing is, neither Ricky nor Abbie have the ability to take the time off without penalty, so when Ricky has to leave his deliveries behind and go see Seb, Maloney gives all his deliveries that day to another driver and slaps a fine on him in addition to everything. In a heartbreaking scene where Ricky asks Maloney for a bit of time off to get a hold of things, Maloney answers that he’s not Ricky’s boss; Ricky owns a franchise and Maloney merely supplies him with his deliveries, so he can find his own employee to cover his hours. 

Whenever he needs to boss Ricky around, Maloney acts as his employer, but whenever some benefits flow the other way, from employer to employee, Maloney reminds Ricky that he’s a contractor and his own boss. There’s nothing manufactured about this dynamic—it’s a fact of life for millions of people in the modern world—but it perfectly illustrates the dysfunctional system that Ricky, Abbie, and others are enslaved to. Thus, Loach isn’t warping reality to fit his political aims; he’s just focusing on the details of this kind of life, depicting the cause-and-effect of what it looks like when such a precarious system is upended.

Although most of the plot development is along these lines, with troubles piling up with no way to mitigate them, Sorry We Missed You is not all doldrums and economic horrors. If it were, it’d be unbearable. Loach and his filmmaking partner, screenwriter Paul Laverty, also focus on the small moments of grace that are found in the midst of hardship. Sometimes this is found in the genuine warmth and love between Abbie and her patients—her employers want her to call them “customers,” but she refuses to use such a depersonalizing word. At other times, it’s the way that Ricky shoots the shit with a person he’s delivering a parcel to, allowing human connection and chitchat to break through the economic transaction, or how Seb and his little sister, Liza (Katie Proctor), look out for each other in their parents’ absence. These moments are essential in showing that the Turners’ lives are not worthless; there is love and respite even in hardship. It’s just that no amount of good-feeling can relieve the economic pressures they feel.

Anyone who pays attention to the people around them who work precarious jobs—the Uber driver, the Amazon parcel delivery person, the fast food worker—will recognize someone like Ricky and Abbie. Sorry We Missed You lets you go further than merely daydreaming about that person’s troubles and lets you experience their intimate sorrows and joys for 100 minutes. The cumulative effect of this approach is devastating. Loach goes one step further than most social realists and makes it clear that the characters are not the architects of their own doom; they are victims of a larger monster that infiltrates every aspect of their human relationships. 

Thus, calling Sorry We Missed You a social realist horror film, although Loach would probably blanch at the term, would be the most accurate way of describing its effects on the viewer. Watching such a life for 100 minutes is something close to having a nightmare; I imagine living that life everyday would be like existing in a nightmare from which you can never wake up. And considering that we’re all facing a looming depression and social upheaval in light of a pandemic, perhaps we can all do with putting ourselves in another person’s shoes for 100 minutes, if only to steel ourselves for the inevitable moment when those shoes become our own.

8 out of 10

Sorry We Missed You (2019, UK/France/Belgium)

Directed by Ken Loach; written by Paul Laverty; starring Kris Hitchen, Debbie Honeywood, Rhys Stone, Katie Proctor, Ross Brewster.

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