You’ll be sorry if you miss this raw portrait of modern day Britain 

This film (Sorry we Missed You) will certainly focus minds away from the day-in-day-out-Brexit-deal-no-deal-general-election-are-we-having-one-aren’t-we-having-one-gloom!

As I walked into the cinema Twitter was bubbling with the announcement of the impending December general election. 

The country may be worrying about big ideologies, but this film looks at what is actually important. The real impact that policies, rules and legislation have on real people’s day-to-day lives. The decent, hard-working people and what’s happening to them. 

Ken Loach (director) and Paul Laverty (writer) address zero hour contracts in this savagely raw depiction of one family trying to function in an increasingly dysfunctional world. 

It is powerful stuff. Gritty, gruelling but so so important. 

It centres around Ricky (Kris Hitchen) who used to be a builder but lost his job and family house in the 2008 economic meltdown. Now he’s desperate to build hope for his family and buy a house so he takes a job as a delivery driver in a bid to earn more. 

He’s sold the job as a ‘franchise’ opportunity where he’s ‘self employed’ and it’s his rules and his ways. But it’s anything but. He is saddled with more responsibility and more stress. He has to live and die by what is affectionately termed ‘the gun’ which is his mobile tracker which monitors his every move so parcel recipients can accurately track their precious goods are at every stage of their journey. It’s like an electronic tag but a heavy heavy electronic tag that drags him down. 

His family are wonderful and warm. His wife Abbie (Debbie Honeywood) is also dancing the zero-hour-contract-tune. She’s a nurse who does home visits to the needy and is the absolute picture of kindness and warmth. Nothing is too much trouble for her – despite having the most horrible issues going on in her own life. Her theory about how she should nurture those she’s caring for ‘as if they were me own mam’ – and she does just that with big buckets of compassion and humanity. 

Their daughter Liza Jane (Katie Proctor) is smart and wise beyond her years (at about 12-ish I think) and pretty much looks after herself while her parents slave away on 14-hour days. The most tender and charming moments of this A-grade film are when she helps her dad out on his deliveries and how spending time with him is all that matters to her – even if that means charging round the cities desperately delivering parcels.

Her brother Seb (Rhys Stone) is older and far more trouble. While his parents focus on building the family’s future and making ends meet – he’s bunking off school and spends every moment he can spraying walls with his graffiti.

This isn’t vandalism to him though. This is his passion and finds his hope in this art. It is all he cares about and probably all that keeps him going. He sells his brand new Goretex jacket to buy paint showing just how much he cares about his tag. He’s cheeky and quick-witted and despite the pain he causes his family you can’t help but care about him. 

Ricky has to take time off work to try to bring Seb back into the fold and this is when the brutal realisation hits him that he’s being taken for a ride by the big distribution company he’s slaving for. The ‘franchise opportunity’ the company has presented to him is not at all what it seems and he is saddled with liability, more debts and no hope of taking a day off unless he finds someone else to cover his round. 

His hope is gone, his future is bleak and he is being destroyed by this money-grabbing company. And it’s not just him that’s being destroyed and it’s not just his family that are being savagely crippled by the zero-hour contract system – it’s happening to millions of other people and their families. 

Something’s broken with this system and it’s breaking good, hard-working honest people and their families. This film gives you a gritty glimpse of this issue and it’s a sobering punch in the guts. 

Ken loach and Paul Laverty – you are absolute heroes for making this insightful, important film. And the acting is so good and so real that it plays out like a hard-edged documentary. 

If this film was mandatory viewing in schools and other organisations then maybe decision-makers would make better decisions and the world might be a brighter place.