Critics reviews

Natalia Stonebanks gives a remarkably self-effacing, Linda Manz-ish performance in her few brief scenes. Is she a professional actor or someone who was just hanging around? Everyone does a seamless job here, especially the family and the belligerent delivery boss, a frightening guard dog of a human (Ross Brewster). But this odd girl who left town stuck in my mind.

In this case, Loach, working with screenwriter Paul Laverty for the fifteenth time, has cracked the gig economy, quietly revealing it as an insatiable monster that chews up the working class and spits them out while consumers at home bay for instantaneous convenience.

In this unsparing but deeply compassionate film, viewers get a chance to see the fatigue, stress and bewilderment of modern life for what they are: not the regrettable side effects of market-driven progress, but the results of cynicism and greed, and the unfathomable human cost of wanting what we want, right now.

As you might be able to discern, this is not an easy film, but it is a brilliant film, and one that encompasses an aspect of the contemporary world with both grace and fisticuffs.

[Loach] now makes diatribes pounded into the vague shape of drama—not so much message movies as messages in search of movies. Sorry We Missed You fits cleanly into that agitprop tradition.

[W]hile it’s tempting to call “Sorry We Missed You” melodrama, the fact that Laverty and Loach take their cues from research and interviews keeps the tension visceral, not artificially heightened... In their domestic gut-punch of a story, they’ve exposed our new feudalism in a way that feels honest and blisteringly human.

The film has a lot to say about the failures of modern society but Loach makes sure that the story is about the characters, not the issues.

Well-researched and highly detailed in how it lays bare the empty promises of the gig economy and the ruthless techno-feudalism of e-commerce, Sorry We Missed You is a movie that will infuriate you. But what makes it one of Loach’s best isn’t just its rage (which is plentiful) but its compassion (which is overwhelming).

Except this is a Loach movie, and along with being one of Earth’s most venerable and venerated directors, he’s almost without peer as a filmmaker formidably committed to exposing the sins of our wages... He knows you’re unlikely to cancel anything. But he damn sure wants you to think long and hard about that next one-click buy.

To watch Sorry We Missed You is to realize that, despite its dedication to showing how people live and love and work (and work, and work, and work) in everyday Britain, this is a story that goes far beyond the United Kingdom. It ends on a sequence that’s as heartbreaking as it moving, and one that would read as hopeless were its creators not so devoted to maintaining the dignity of the people onscreen.

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.

Unfussily photographed by Robbie Ryan, this increasingly gruelling (and somewhat schematic) drama plays out under the slate-grey skies of Newcastle, the setting for Loach and Laverty’s superior I, Daniel Blake, to which this acts as a companion piece.