I, Daniel Blake (2016)

(dir. Ken Loach) This is the story of Daniel Blake (Dave Johns) who, after suffering a heart attack, is refused the UK’s Employment and Support Allowance and told to go back to work. He goes on to meet Katie (Hayley Squires), a Londoner single mum who has moved to Newcastle, hundreds of miles away from home but the only place where a house is available for her and her two children.

The scene with Katie in the food bank is the most disturbing and horrifying moment in film I have seen for a long time. Hayley Squires’ performance there was outstanding. Even gloomier, though, is that Katie never gets a neat resolution–as far as we know she ends the film still doing sex work so she can feed herself and her children without the food bank’s help.

Daniel’s story is also grim. My only critique would be that I felt the timing of his death and the discovery of his letter slightly undercut the verisimilitude that Ken Loach had crafted so well in the rest of the film. The film didn’t need to be that dramatically neat to make its heartfelt and important points about the cruelty of unemployment bureaucracy. ★★★★☆