The triumphant winner of this year’s Cannes Palme d’Or, Ken Loach’s fierce, emphatic drama I, Daniel Blake is purportedly his last film.
It’s pure Loach, with a script by his regular screenwriter Paul Laverty, and follows the Daniel Blake (Dave Johns) of the title, a fifty-something carpenter living in Newcastle who, after suffering a heart attack, seeks to claim state benefits.
Told by his NHS consultant that he’s unfit for work, he applies for disability benefit. However, after a ‘healthcare professional’ appointed by the Department for Work and Pensions interviews him over the phone for just ten minutes, it’s decided that he’s ineligible.
Humiliatingly labelled a scrounger when he is anything but, Daniel is forced to apply instead for jobseeker’s allowance and comes up against further absurdities of the welfare state. Meanwhile, he befriends Katie (Hayley Squires) – a single mother to two children, and new to Newcastle – who’s also suffering on the breadline.
Overwhelmingly moving, I, Daniel Blake is a stark reminder of the profound injustices of life in contemporary Britain and the brutal inhumanity of the system, making it painfully clear that issues so often invoked theoretically in the media in fact result in real human suffering, which exists in plain sight.
