Sorry We Missed You

Sorry We Missed You is a 2019 drama film directed by Ken Loach. The film was written by Paul Laverty and produced by Rebecca O'Brien. It was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival.

Principal photography began in September 2018 in the Newcastle area in north-east England. It is scheduled for release in the UK at the beginning of November 2019.

Plot
The film is based around the theme of Zero-hour contracts which affect the employment of both main characters. Ricky (Hitchen), a former building worker, is a delivery driver living in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, who receives fees rather than wages in his job. His wife, Abbie, is a contract nurse and home carer. His employment means he is obliged to work for his firm by renting a van from the firm with strict delivery targets. He persuades his wife to sell her car, which she needs for her own job, to be able to afford paying for the van. Ricky's debts increase because of his employment situation, and his wife's patients suffer neglect.

Cast

 * Kris Hitchen as Ricky
 * Debbie Honeywood as Abby
 * Rhys Stone as Seb
 * Katie Proctor as Liza Jae
 * Ross Brewster as Maloney
 * Charlie Richmond as Henry
 * Julian Ions as Freddie
 * Sheila Dunkerley as Rosie
 * Maxie Peters as Robert
 * Christopher John Slater as Ben
 * Heather Wood as Mollie
 * Alberto Dumba as Harpoon
 * Natalia Stonebanks as Roz
 * Jordan Collard as Dodge
 * Dave Turner as Magpie
 * Stephen Clegg as Policeman
 * Darren Jones as Council worker
 * Nikki Marshall as Traffic warden

Reception
On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 76% based on 29 reviews, with an average rating of 7.41/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Sorry We Missed You may strike some as tending toward the righteously didactic, but director Ken Loach's passionate approach remains effective." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 80 out of 100, based on 10 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".

David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter wrote that the film "is an expertly judged and profoundly humane movie, made without frills or fuss but startlingly direct in its emotional depiction of the tough stuff that is the fiber of so many ordinary lives."

Peter Bradshaw, in The Guardian, believed in was superior to Loach's previous film I, Daniel Blake (2016), which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Bradshaw wrote: "it is more dramatically varied and digested, with more light and shade in its narrative progress and more for the cast to do collectively. I was hit in the solar plexus by this movie, wiped out by the simple honesty and integrity of the performances." The review in The Times praised the performance of newcomer Debbie Honeywood as Abbie, who was cast after a talent search of non-professionals. The newspaper's contributor, Kevin Maher, believed the film should have concentrated on her character instead of Ricky, Abbie's husband.

Geoffrey Macnab wrote in The Independent that Loach's film "captures brilliantly the alienation and existential anguish that its main characters feel. There is nothing they can do to help themselves. The more they fight to change their circumstances, the worse those circumstances become." Macnab commented that Loach and his screenwriter Paul Laverty "pursue their story to its logical conclusion, ending the film in a way that is both ingenious and devastating."

According to Owen Gleiberman in Variety, "Loach stages all of this with supreme confidence and flow" leading to "a fraught, touching, and galvanizing movie." Raphael Abrahams, in his review for the Financial Times states: "In the end credits he [Loach] gives thanks to those drivers whose testimony informed the film but who wished to remain anonymous. He is their much-needed voice and remains that of our moral conscience."