Backing up his mate Marty Scorcese's negative comments regarding Marvel movies, Francis Ford Coppola said that true cinema is where you walk away having learnt, been enlightened, or inspired. I disagree with their negative critique of superhero films as the same measurement could be applied to their ‘type’ of films, but that’s an argument for another time and place. But there is one thing I think that Marty, Coppola, and I could agree on. You may not walk away inspired from Loach’s Sorry We Missed You but you walk away having learnt and been enlightened regarding a hidden scourge on modern, Western society. Sorry We Missed You will shake you to your core. 

 

Ricky Turner and his family have been fighting an uphill struggle against debt since the 2008 financial crash. An opportunity to wrestle back some independence appears with a shiny new van and the chance to run a franchise as a self-employed delivery driver. It's hard work, and his wife's job as a carer is no easier. The family unit is strong but when both are pulled in different directions everything comes to breaking point.

 

The narrative is crafted in such a way that it feels almost like a documentary, that this isn’t really a fictional drama at all, but the observation of a family’s struggle in modern Britain. The largely unknown cast adds to this sense that we as the audience are merely a fly on the wall watching it all unfold. 

 

Sorry We Missed You heart achingly displays the incremental way in which life can go from bad to worse for the Turner family. All it takes is for one small mistake, not of their own making but completely understandable and circumstantial, and their lives head in a downward spiral. 

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Its not entertaining per say but its confronting, arresting, sobering thought provoking stuff that will haunt you, in the best possible way, for days and weeks after seeing it. The kinda cinema Coppola and Scorcese would approved of.

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A searing critique on our Western consumerist society, Sorry We Missed You is a drama of thundering power that will haunt you for days. One of the most necessary films of 2019.