Now well into his eighties, Loach certainly can't be accused of softening with age. Sorry We Missed You, with a Geordie family struggling to cope under the yoke of zero-hours Britain, is as angry as anything he's ever done, and the depressing thing is that even if you know his focus will always selectively be on those dealt the hardest of hands and scant prospect of a light at the end of the tunnel, you also know that what you get is something true.
For what it's worth, the succession of cruel blows landed here befall a dad who has to take on a delivery driver job and work every hour God sends lest he be fined for falling ill or any other imaginable cause, his wife who's a care worker with a thankless employer, and out of their two kids the teenage son is a truant who only wants to cover the town in graffiti and looks down on his father a a failure at the same time. Anyone who calls it wallowing in misery is either too jaded or socially privileged to be able to take the message, and criticising Loach's films for not really being cinema is not the point: of course they're not, they're the docudramas he's always made because any artifice or gloss would detract fatally from the realism.
You do wonder who'll take up the mantle of screen firebrand-in-chief once Loach is gone. Perhaps the anaesthetic effect of modern materialistic culture as an environment to grow up in makes that impossible.
6/10
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