The Upcoming
  • Culture
    • Art
    • Cinema
      • Movie reviews
      • Film festivals
    • Food & Drinks
      • News & Features
      • Restaurant & bar reviews
      • Interviews & Recipes
    • Literature
    • Music
      • Live music
    • Theatre
    • Shows & On demand
  • Fashion & Lifestyle
    • Accessories
    • Beauty
    • News & Features
    • Shopping & Trends
    • Tips & How-tos
    • Fashion weeks
  • What’s On
    • Art exhibitions
    • Theatre shows
  • Tickets
  • Join us
    • Editorial unit
    • Our writers
    • Join the team
    • Join the mailing list
    • Support us
    • Contact us
  • Interviews
  • Competitions
  • Special events
    • Film festivals
      • Berlin
      • Tribeca
      • Sundance London
      • Cannes
      • Locarno
      • Venice
      • London
      • Toronto
    • Fashion weeks
      • London Fashion Week
      • New York Fashion Week
      • Milan Fashion Week
      • Paris Fashion Week
      • Haute Couture
      • London Fashion Week Men’s
  • Facebook

  • Twitter

  • Instagram

  • YouTube

  • RSS

Cannes Film Festival 2019

Sorry We Missed You

Cannes Film Festival 2019: Sorry We Missed You | Review
17 May 2019
Joseph Owen
Joseph Owen
Avatar
Joseph Owen
17 May 2019

Movie and show review

Joseph Owen

Sorry We Missed You

★★★★★

Release date

1st November 2019

Special event

“I’ve got to go to work!” There are few insincere sentiments in Sorry We Missed You. Each line is a lesson. Good will towards this film rests on one’s inclination to digest art in the form of social policy. Director Ken Loach returns with his usual mixture of heavy didacticism and working class nostalgia, targeting the zero-hours gig economy that devalues hard graft and an honest wage.

This is more of the same from Loach and longtime collaborator and scriptwriter Paul Laverty. Low-income families face up to – and are ground down by – the forces of late capitalism. Ricky (Kris Hitchen) and his wife Abby (Debbie Honeywood) are both bound up in precarious employment, he as a self-employed delivery driver, she as a home visit carer. Their two school-age kids, Seb (Rhys Stone) and Liza Jane (Katie Proctor), are smart but vulnerable to tensions within the family, to the rising fear of debt, stasis and decline.

Laverty’s dialogue skewers the language of new work practices. Kris is no longer an employee but an “onboarder”; he delivers “precisors” rather than products. Disingenuous targets and arcane regulations inhibit his supposed flexibility and freedom. Abby has “clients” and needs to perform “tuck-ins”, euphemisms for basic duties of care and reciprocation. The weight of woe may appeal to Cannes jury President Alejandro González Iñárritu, the repetitious suffering equivalent to The Revenant.

The extent of interviews and research are again clear, but whether this amounts to truth value is moot. Proposed social realism has an artificial edge. The real is made unreal. When characters become vessels for state-of-the-nation polemics, it detracts from both the political message and the art object. Even the jokey banter possesses an eerie unfamiliarity. A postgraduate thesis could be written on the overwrought football patter in Loach’s work.

Extended aesthetic analysis is possibly redundant. Robbie Ryan’s simple compositions allow family and work disputes to simmer and boil, while the politics behind these feelings are foregrounded, immediate. To criticise Loach for being on the nose is a reductive exercise and perhaps misses the point. He directs naturalistic performances that offer levity to a regularly leaden screenplay.

Despite moments of overreach, Loach has a way of cleaving through debate and posturing. His last film, I, Daniel Blake, won the Palme and spoke to the political moment in Britain, one of reduced benefits, labyrinthine bureaucracies and multiplying food banks. By returning to Newcastle, we reproduce a robust sense of locale, a world that is not simply hermetic but illustrative. After all, the type of economy brought to light is necessarily global.

The same qualms about pointedness will be directed here, while the depressing determinism of the narrative resists different shadings, ambiguities and complexities. But there are moments that generate intense force, that are fiercely emotive just short of parody. You’d have a heart of stone not to cry, even if you later laugh to yourself.

★★★★★

Joseph Owen

Sorry We Missed You is released nationwide on 1st November 2019.

Read more reviews from our Cannes Film Festival 2019 coverage here.

For further information about the event visit the Cannes Film Festival website here.

Watch some clips from Sorry We Missed You here:

Related Itemsreview

More in Cannes

The Traitor (Il traditore)

★★★★★
Joseph Owen
Read More

The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily (La fameuse invasion des ours en Sicile)

★★★★★
Joseph Owen
Read More

Adam

★★★★★
Joseph Owen
Read More

Frankie

★★★★★
Joseph Owen
Read More

Cannes 2019: Awards, predictions and highlights from the festival

The editorial unit
Read More

Sibyl

★★★★★
Sam Gray
Read More

“We’ve had to face some interesting moments of prejudice”: Bacurau directors Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles discuss their mysterious Western at Cannes 2019

Sam Gray
Read More

“If I play a smaller role, nobody will ever forget it”: Bacurau star Udo Kier recounts his long and varied career at Cannes 2019

Sam Gray
Read More

To Live to Sing (Huo Zhe Chang Zhe)

★★★★★
Mary-Catherine Harvey
Read More
Scroll for more
Tap

Movie and show review

Joseph Owen

Sorry We Missed You

★★★★★

Release date

1st November 2019

Special event

  • Popular

  • Latest

  • TOP PICKS

  • Outside the Wire
    ★★★★★
    Cinema
  • A Livestream with David Bedella at Crazy Coqs Online
    ★★★★★
    Theatre
  • Undercover at Morpheus Show Online
    ★★★★★
    Theatre
  • Blithe Spirit
    ★★★★★
    Cinema
  • You Me at Six – Suckapunch
    ★★★★★
    Album review
  • WandaVision: Marvel’s charming sitcom proves an astounding success
    ★★★★★
    Cinema
  • Sleaford Mods – Spare Ribs
    ★★★★★
    Album review
  • The Queen’s Gambit: A chess story that’s not about the moves but the motives
    ★★★★★
    Cinema
  • Away
    ★★★★★
    Cinema
  • Imperial Blue
    ★★★★★
    Movie review
  • WandaVision: Marvel’s charming sitcom proves an astounding success
    ★★★★★
    Cinema
  • The Queen’s Gambit: A chess story that’s not about the moves but the motives
    ★★★★★
    Cinema
  • Undercover at Morpheus Show Online
    ★★★★★
    Theatre
  • Ten short literary collections to get you back into reading
    Literature
  • Mayor
    ★★★★★
    Cinema
The Upcoming
Pages
  • Contact us
  • Join mailing list
  • Join us
  • Our London food map
  • Our writers
  • Support us
  • What, when, why

Copyright © 2011-2020 FL Media

Cannes Film Festival 2019: Atlantics (Atlantique) | Review
Cannes Film Festival 2019: For Sama | Review