Review: I, Daniel Blake

I, Daniel Blake is unmistakably a Ken Loach film. Reportedly his swan song, the surprise Cannes Palme d'Or winner is the latest in the line of his social-realist dramas about the struggles of the downtrodden. Loach is an extremely humanist filmmaker and his clear-eyed empathy for his characters and unadorned direction extracts magnificence from mundanities.

The tracks in simultaneously excruciating and comic detail the catch-22 situation of Daniel Blake (Dave Johns), a 59-year-old Newcastle widower and carpenter recovering from a heart attack. Seeking Employment and Support Allowance (welfare) from the state, he becomes ensnared in a monumental farce of bureaucratic red tape. The opening scene - in which Daniel is asked a barrage of increasingly inane questions about everything but his heart condition - is but a minor indication of the Kafka-esque rigamarole of procedures and paperwork that await a man who simply wants to get back to work, but has to ask for financial assistance because he's forbidden to go back to work until the doctors rule him fit enough to return.

Also caught in the system is single mother Katie (Hayley Squires), who's come up from London with her two kids to seek social housing. Again, the government's protocols work against the very people it's supposed to help. Katie is denied her week's benefits because she was late to her appointment despite the fact that the only reason she was late was because she got lost on the way to the job centre. The only good thing about her dire situation is her ensuing friendship with Daniel, who begins helping her out by fixing things around her house and helping to look after the kids.

And so Daniel and Katie suffer through a procession of indignities as every systemic roadblock grinds them into disillusionment. Daniel is forced to jump through hoop after hoop, numbed by telephone helplines that keep you on hold for the length of a football match, befuddled by using computers and smartphones necessary to complete the online forms, and cornered into shame by the government employees who have the heart of automatons. Katie, meanwhile, resorts to petty crime and dodgy jobs in order to feed her kids. One of the film's most stirring moments finds her in a food bank, collecting supplies when her hunger overtakes her. Her hopelessness and Daniel and her daughter's alarm pierces.

Johns and Squires anchor the film, never allowing sentimentality to seep into their soulful performances. Quietly but powerfully told and laced with moments of wry humour, I, Daniel Blake would make a fitting end to Loach's career even as it exemplifies why Loach should rethink his retirement.

I, Daniel Blake

Directed by: Ken Loach

Written by: Paul Laverty

Starring: Dave Johns, Hayley Squires, Sharon Percy, Briana Shann, Dylan McKiernan