I, Daniel Blake (2016)

★★★★ 11.40pm, Saturday, RTÉ One

“My name is Daniel Blake. I am a man, not a dog”

When Ken Loach was lming Jimmy’s Hall (2014) in Ireland, word went out that it would be the great man’s last-ever dramatic feature: henceforth the director would concentrate on documentaries. Thankfully, reports of his cinematic demise were greatly exaggerated and Loach bounced back with a movie that proved the 79-yearold director remained the most politically committed of lmmakers and had lost none of his ferocious anger.

I, Daniel Blake is a simple but powerful story looking at two people – a young, single mum (Hayley Squires) and a middle-aged man (Dave Johns) – from di erent backgrounds but with a similar grievance: the struggle to navigate Britain’s labyrinthine welfare state. She has just moved to Newcastle with her two young children, having lived for two years in a homeless hostel in London. He is a builder recovering from a heart attack but, though his GP has declared him medically un t for work, the vagaries of the welfare system decree that he must still actively seek out employment. Both nd it impossible to make ends meet and this common ground becomes the basis for an unlikely friendship. Angry, poignant, bitter and, at times, funny, I, Daniel Blake is a must-watch drama. It’s not always easy for inexperienced actors (Squires is a newcomer; Johns, a stand-up comic) to adapt to Loach’s working methods (script details being drip-fed when required), but both are superb. One powerful sequence inside a local food bank will live long in the memory. This is a movie that should have done for Britain’s red-tape-heavy welfare state what Loach’s famous TV play, Cathy Come Home (1966), did for homeless legislation. That it didn’t explains why Ken Loach is no closer to hanging up his camera.