We are in Newcastle, England. Ricky (Kris Hitchen), unemployed, takes a job as a delivery driver. The job is part of the gig economy, a system of work that has taken hold in the western world based on labour undertaken without contracts, rights or other guarantees. Abby (Debbie Honeywood) works as a home care nurse for the elderly and disabled, building relationships mediated by the precarious world of social care. With her so-called “zero hour contract”, Abby depends on whatever jobs come in by phone call.

Workplace exploitation — and its consequences for social life, precarity and its effects on an average working-class family — is at the heart of this film. By looking at the margins, Ken Loach shows us the chimera of a world that is falling apart, rooted in unfettered capitalism and the idea of using new technologies to achieve ever tighter social control. As Ricky says, “they always know where we are, where we’re going”. In the thick of the gig economy, job insecurity is masked by the fantasy of greater flexibility and autonomy. Yet in order to deliver, this father of two must pay for and maintain a van that will never belong to him: “It’s my business”, says Ricky. The reply comes: “It’s our franchise!”

At a time when the era of unionised work is coming to an end, the uber-isation of economic relations transforms and radicalises everyone around him: his friends, his family and acquaintances. Abby and Ricky navigate through this cruelly real world with a teenage son (Rhys Stone) who is going astray and a younger daughter (Katie Proctor) with all the worries we all know so well: her parents’ absence, the arguments, the conflicts. But the events and their impact on family life are only a signal of family dynamics to come. If we may criticise the film for looking at the poor as “others”, we too are others ourselves. We, who navigate the control we are subjected to, the solitude of digital technologies and our ineffable relationship with institutions.

Nevertheless, the film empowers its various voices and personalities with sophistication and subtlety, its camera attentive to looks, gestures and impasses. The two children contain a kind of hope, and Ken Loach has always been a master of portraying young people! The rebellious teenage son and his sad, fearful younger sister stand for new possibilities. They are people to come. There is also feeling towards women: Abby’s work is precarious like her husband’s, yet she must also undertake domestic work and childcare, as well as emotional work, both at home and on call. Loach emphasises the ways in which the experience of job insecurity affects Abby differently for being a woman and mother, but doesn’t romanticise things: by the end of the film, any hope that Abby has in her struggles and ethos, believing as she does in exchange, solidarity and emotions, has been quashed.

This film is the result of a long period of research with real-life people. Some of these stories were collected in the institutions portrayed in I, Daniel Blake (2016), which had already introduced the themes of solitude and the lack of togetherness among precarious workers. In the great tradition of British realism, formed at a time when television documentaries and direct cinema converged, Loach’s screenplays are based on real-life stories, organically developed through extensive conversations with Laverty, screenwriter and author, and Loach, and performed by professional and non-professional actors. Never forgetting the function of his films as documents, there is also an “activist” dimension and an enormous generosity in Loach’s poetic attempts to produce a certain “reality”, part of a broader desire to make films that can influence the contemporary social and political landscape. Across half a century, and up to this year, when he confirmed he would step away from the camera, Ken Loach has worked with historic events such as Irish independence, the Spanish civil war and the miners’ strike in Britain. Yet, from I, Daniel Blake onwards, Loach’s cinema has taken a different direction: a kind of impasse, or block, the end of a cycle. To begin with, Ricky is told: “You are your own master”, but we come to the end of this journey with the sensation that our lives no longer belong to us. This despite this family’s immense vitality. A family like many others.