Mark Reviews Movies: SORRY WE MISSED YOU

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 7, 2020

The so-called "gig economy" provides people with the concept of freedom and independence in employment, but without the benefits and regulations of the traditional employer-employee relationship, it also comes a level of uncertainty and instability. Can a person genuinely be free and independent if the foundation of their livelihood is uncertain and unstable?

That's the central question of Sorry We Missed You, a slice-of-life drama about a family of four trying to financially, physically, and emotionally survive within the modern-day work environment. It's an ordinary story about a group of ordinary people, and because of that, screenwriter Paul Laverty and director Ken Loach are able to create a veritable nightmare out of everyday occurrences and concerns.

There are no major revelations, transformative character arcs, or significant plot developments. That's the source of the film's power. These characters go through their lives, in the only ways they can and know how to do so, and from that, the inevitable drama of wanting more but being stuck in place emerges. This is a film that's quietly devastating in its ordinariness.

The family consists of the husband-wife pairing of Ricky (Kris Hitchen) and Abbie (Debbie Honeywood), as well as their teenage son Seb (Rhys Stone) and younger daughter Liza Jae (Katie Proctor). Ricky, originally from Manchester, once had a stable job but was laid off for reasons beyond his control and through no fault of his own. The family, now residing in the northeastern part of England in the city of Newcastle upon Tyne, is thousands of pounds in debt. They're still renting a home, because the couple's plan to buy a house with a mortgage was hindered at the last minute by Ricky's job loss.

The bills keep coming, and Abbie's job as a caretaker for the elderly, the infirmed, and the disabled is never going to get them out of the hole. She's paid a flat rate for each visit. It doesn't matter if she spends more time with a "client"—a word she hates for how impersonal it sounds (The official lack of personal connection set against the reality and inevitability of such connections is a running theme here). Her pay remains the same, whether she spends an hour attending to someone or three hours. One of her clients, who fed striking workers in 1984, wonders what happened to the eight-hour workday and other guarantees for which her generation and others before it fought.

Ricky's big plan to pay the bills and start paying off the debt is to start driving for a delivery company. Here's the deal: The company contracts its drivers, who are "self-employed" for legal purposes, and they receive compensation for completing their daily routes. There is no salary. Like with Abbie's job, there are no hourly rates. Certain routes are paid more than others, and while technically a driver like Ricky is his or her own boss, the local depot manager Maloney (Ross Brewster, amiably heartless as the self-proclaimed "Number One Bastard" of the company) assigns those routes to his "independent" drivers.

This, of course, sounds like a regular job, save for multiple provisos. Drivers can, in theory, make their own schedules, but for the enterprise to be profitable, they have to work more often than not. A missed day without a replacement driver is charged a fine by the company. A day isn't regulated to eight hours. It only ends when all of the packages on the van are delivered. As for the van, the company will rent one for a couple thousand pounds a month, or a driver can provide his or her own, which, for this family, means that Ricky has to sell his wife's car—the one she uses for travel in her own job—for the down payment.

The financial and logistical issues of this setup should be obvious, but Laverty's screenplay is subtly ingenious in the way it translates those practical problems, as well as the consequences of running into them and trying to find solutions for them, into believable drama. Ricky finds himself driving for most of the day and into the night, on account of the delivery load and assorted delays from having the wrong address, to people not being home, and to traffic.

For her part, Abbie has to take the bus to visit her clients, and the added transportation time means that she often has longer hours, too. They're both exhausted at the end of the day, especially Ricky, whose hopeful optimism for being a good provider for his family gradually becomes anger and exasperation.

The kids, who are almost as important here as the adults, do their best, although Seb, as a normal teenager, takes advantage of his parents' absence to skip school, hang out spray-painting graffiti with his friends, and get into other kinds of trouble. This only aggravates Ricky's temper, and poor Liza Jae, who dutifully takes on more responsibility than a kid her age should have to, starts losing sleep and wetting the bed because of the pressure and the rise of tensions in the home. As things become worse for Seb, Ricky has to choose between his family and his job, which, under the circumstances, is the only thing keeping the family financially afloat.

Loach simply observes as all of this and more unfold, without any flash, knowing that the camera need only show us the actors as they deftly, naturalistically portray this family and its individual members' mounting crises. Hitchen is assured as a man whose hope is destroyed piece by belittling piece, until he's little more than an empty husk, filled with desperation and rising frustration. As a caretaker working in business model that doesn't seem to realize how much it actually takes to care for people, Honeywood's performance serves as an oasis of decency, and it's heartbreaking to watch as the foundations of Abbie's life are shaken.

Loach's more-or-less hands-off approach (simple blocking to show the family coming together and falling apart, close-ups to show the toll of this situation on an intimate level, and slow fades-to-black to make us feel the passage of time) is the wise choice for this material. We're there with this family for every moment of pain and disappointment. Laverty's screenplay certainly raises the stakes on the scenario, but every development is believable, either as a consequence of the system at play here or as a result of the characters' own personalities, goals, and setbacks.

The film's target is specific, but in focusing on the everyday personal struggles of each of these characters, it achieves a near-universal resonance. Sorry We Missed You is a domestic tragedy playing out in slow motion. The film is so precise in establishing and expanding its central problem that it becomes an existential tragedy, too. What good is the supposed freedom of the gig when it takes over your day, your week, your life, and your very soul?

Note: Following a limited theatrical release, Sorry We Missed You is available via distributor Zeitgeist Films' partnership with Kino Lorber's virtual theatrical program Kino Marquee. You can rent the film for home viewing, with part of the cost going to your local independent theaters (e.g., the Music Box Theatre in Chicago). For more information and to purchase access to the film, click here. Participating theaters are listed on the page.

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