I, Daniel Blake
Director: Ken Loach
Stars: Dave Johns, Hayley Squires, Sharon Percy
Duration: 100 mins
Class: 12
KRS Releasing Ltd

Watching I, Daniel Blake is a sobering experience. The story of an out-of-work joiner in Newcastle struggling to survive in the face of increasingly uncaring bureaucracy is brutally raw and emotionally engaging. It paints a picture of scenes that should not really exist in a modern democracy.

Dave Johns plays the eponymous Daniel. Recently widowed, he is recovering from a heart attack on the job and his GP, surgical consultant and physiotherapist agree he can’t go back to work. He applies for welfare, yet a ‘health professional’ – who is neither a doctor nor a nurse – deems he is capable of working.

Dan seeks to appeal this decision, but in the meantime he will only receive unemployment benefits if he proves he is making an effort to find a job… which of course he can’t because of his health.

This nightmarish vicious circle of bureaucracy will have you raging at the screen. Director Ken Loach, who has built a career on films dealing with social issues in an honest and unfiltered manner, here turns his focus on the welfare system in modern-day Britain; a system intent on rooting out cheats, whether they exist or not.

It is a powerful indictment of the system, the authorities and of the heartless people doing its dirty work... hiding behind platitudes like ‘It’s my job’ and ‘we’ll call you back’ (after poor Dan has been on hold for longer than ‘a football match’) and rules and regulations that are there to make the system completely inaccessible to those who are entitled to it.

This nightmarish vicious circle of bureaucracy will have you raging at the screen

Although Daniel is excellent at his job, he is computer illiterate and his frustration at trying to apply for his benefits online is palpable. A scene where a job centre employee looks at his hand-written CV with obvious disgust makes you wonder at how insensitive people can be.

On one of his useless jaunts to the job centre, Daniel meets Katie Morgan (Hayley Squires) a single mother-of-two who is in a similar predicament and can’t find work. The burgeoning friendship between the two offers some much-needed warmth and heart to the otherwise pretty disheartening proceedings.

Johns, a stand-up comic by profession, imbues the working-class Daniel with an innate sense of decency, dignity and self-deprecating humour that makes him a man to be admired and never pitied. This is a man who has always done an honest day’s work, took care of his wife until she died and expects nothing more than what is expected from him.

And Johns perfectly captures the essence of a man whose spirit is slowly being crushed by the system. That he attempts to set his problems aside by reaching out to help Katie is typical of him. And through her and her young kids he finds a reason to get up every morning.

As portrayed by the relatively unknown Squires, Katie is similarly proud and strong. This is a woman who upped sticks and left her family and friends behind in London to move to Newcastle, which is supposedly more affordable.

But, before long she is forced to decide between having heat or food. The hardest and most cynical of hearts will crack when, collecting supplies from a food bank, she desperately pulls open a tin of soup and scoops it out messily, so hungry is she. And yet, like Johns, Squires avoids histrionics, making her performance honest and ultimately touching.

The film does threaten to be a little heavy-handed at times – a decision Katie makes when she seeks help from a security guard who has caught her shoplifting is obvious and mishandled, while the denouement piles on the misery a bit too thickly.

Ultimately, however, through Paul Laverty’s incisive script, Loach’s unflinching direction, and aided in no small part by the flawless performances by Johns and Squires, the film reaches its aim – to create awareness of a damaged system that fails the many who really need it to protect itself from the few who abuse it.