Sorry We Missed You
Big hustle
There’s a kind of horror that doesn’t rely on clowns, darkness or blood, just fluorescent lights, inflexible schedules, and a printer that won’t stop printing the wrong label. In Sorry We Missed You (2019), legendary director and man-of-the-people Ken Loach returns to the industrial north of England to deliver a film rooted in the everyday; so much so that it feels less like watching a story and more like being handed someone’s life to carry for an hour and a half. Not everyone’s idea of a great film, but helping you get outside of yourself is what a great movie can do, and Loach continues to deliver.
Sorry We Missed You is about a man named Ricky (Kris Hitchen), who’s been laid off too many times and decides he’s going to “be his own boss.” This means buying a van he can’t afford and delivering packages for a logistics company that claims to offer independence but actually offers total control. His wife Abby (Debbie Honeywood) is a home care worker, but “worker” doesn’t quite capture it—she’s a lifeline for the elderly and disabled, and like Ricky, she’s constantly under pressure to do more in less time. The movie starts with the promise of self-employment and ends somewhere closer to spiritual foreclosure. Not because the characters have failed, but because the system they’re in is designed to punish the diligent, the desperate, and the decent. Think about the last time you did the “right thing” in spite of being incentivized to do something else.
Loach has made a career out of refusing to look away from big systemic problems, and here, his camera stays close to the family as they try to keep each other afloat. There’s no musical score nudging your emotions, no big speeches or cathartic breakthroughs—just work shifts, minor accidents, bad luck, and a life where dignity feels slowly ground into the floor one work hour at a time. It's capitalism not as an abstract evil, but as a series of logistical decisions that shrink lives down to tracking numbers and toilet breaks.
What’s particularly devastating is how good everyone is at trying. Ricky believes, at least for a while, in the promise of hustle culture. Abby loves her patients. Their son is rebelling, but his rebellion feels more like a cry for structure in a world with no margin for error, no patience for “useless” creatures. The tragedy isn’t that the family doesn’t care; it’s that care itself becomes unsustainable.
And that’s what Sorry We Missed You is really about—not just the economic inequality of a big system, but the physical and emotional exhaustion that comes as a result to the individuals residing in the system. The film might make you angry. It might make you want to apologize to the next delivery driver you see. It might make you want to delete your Amazon app. At the very least, it reminds you that behind many packages left on your porch is a body being pushed too hard, and a family wondering if they can make it through another week.
Sorry We Missed You
Written by Paul Laverty; Directed by Ken Loach
2019
101 minutes
English
Recommended way to watch (at time of publication): Streaming on Kanopy and Hoopla (Free services with a public library card)
You’ll like this if you like: Nomadland (2020), I, Daniel Blake (2016), The Florida Project (2017)