Sorry We Missed You

Ken Loach announced his retirement after Jimmy's Hall, came back for I, Daniel Blake and won a second Palme d'Or with it, then returned to the Cannes competition three years later with a companion piece. He was eighty-three. Paul Laverty wrote it, as he has written everything of Loach's since 1996, after months of interviews with drivers and care workers in the north-east.

Ricky, played by the first-time actor Kris Hitchen, signs on at a parcel depot as a franchisee — not an employee, the distinction the film keeps returning to. He sells the family car to put a deposit on a van. Debbie Honeywood is Abby, a home carer paid by the visit rather than the hour, travelling between clients on buses she now has no lift to replace. Their two children are at home with a scanner beeping in the kitchen. Loach shoots it plainly, in sequence, with actors who had not worked before, which is the method that has served him for fifty years.

Reviewers noted that it is angrier and less consoling than I, Daniel Blake, and that the villain has become harder to point at — there is no benefits assessor here, only an operating system. It played to parliamentary screenings and trade-union halls across Europe, and it remains the most precise film anyone has made about the gig economy's central trick: transferring every risk onto the person doing the work while calling it freedom.