The Old Oak

The "K" on the pub sign has been dangling by a single, rusted screw for years, threatening to drop onto the head of any regular brave enough to walk through the door. It’s a perfect, almost too-obvious metaphor for the town itself—a former mining village in Northeast England where the only things left standing are the memories of the 1984 strike and a lot of empty houses. This is the world of Ken Loach, a director who has spent sixty years making movies about people the rest of the world would rather step over than speak to. If this truly is his final film, as he’s hinted, he isn’t going out with a whimper; he’s going out with a pint and a protest.

I watched this on a rainy Tuesday while eating a slightly stale ham sandwich, and honestly, the damp grey on the screen matched the damp grey in my kitchen so perfectly I felt like I could smell the stale tobacco and floor wax of the pub. That’s the Loach magic—he doesn’t build sets; he exhumes reality.

The Last Cathedral in Town

The Old Oak is the name of the pub run by TJ Ballantyne (Dave Turner), a man who looks like he’s been carrying the weight of the entire county on his shoulders since the pits closed. TJ is just trying to keep the lights on, which is hard enough when your clientele consists of embittered locals who feel the world has moved on without them. When a busload of Syrian refugees is dropped into the village, those simmering resentments boil over into something ugly.

Enter Yara (Ebla Mari), a young Syrian photographer with a broken camera and a spirit that hasn’t been crushed by the war she fled. The friendship that sparks between her and TJ is the heart of the film. It isn’t some sentimental, Hollywood "why can't we all just get along" fluff. It’s a gritty, awkward, and often painful negotiation of shared trauma. Dave Turner is a revelation here—he wasn’t a professional actor when Loach found him (he’s a former firefighter), and that lack of "theatre school" polish makes TJ feel like a guy you’ve actually met at a bar at 3:00 PM on a workday.

Not Your Average Sunday Night Drama

In an era where most "social issue" films feel like they were written by a committee looking to win a specific award, Ken Loach and his long-time screenwriter Paul Laverty (the duo behind I, Daniel Blake and The Wind That Shakes the Barley) aren't interested in being subtle. They’re angry. They’re angry at the way the government abandons communities, and they’re angry at how that abandonment turns neighbors against each other.

There’s a scene in the back room of the pub—a room filled with old photographs of the mining strikes—where the film’s thesis comes into focus. It’s about the difference between "charity" and "solidarity." Charity is looking down; solidarity is looking across. The film is essentially a giant middle finger to the "stop the boats" rhetoric of modern British politics, and it doesn't care if that makes you uncomfortable. In fact, it's counting on it.

The cinematography by Robbie Ryan (who did the dizzying work on The Favourite and Poor Things) is surprisingly restrained here. He captures the North of England with a flat, honest light that refuses to romanticize the decay. There are no sweeping "misery porn" shots. Instead, he focuses on faces—the lined, weary faces of the locals and the watchful, haunted eyes of the newcomers.

Breaking the Social Media Spell

What makes The Old Oak feel so contemporary isn't just the subject matter, but how it handles the way we talk to each other now. We see the toxic leak of social media—the Facebook groups where rumors about the refugees grow into "facts"—and how that digital poison infects real-world interactions. It’s a film about the 2020s that feels like it’s reaching back to the 1930s for a solution: eating together.

I’ll be honest: the subplot involving TJ’s dog is a shameless emotional shakedown, but I’ll be damned if it didn’t have me reaching for the tissues anyway. Loach knows how to play his audience, but he earns those tears by grounding them in characters who feel like they actually have bills to pay and hearts that can break.

Is it perfect? No. Some of the dialogue from the pub's "angry regulars" (like Chris McGlade's Vic) can feel a bit like they're reading from a "How to Be a Bigot" handbook. It lacks the gut-punch shock of I, Daniel Blake, opting instead for a communal warmth that occasionally edges toward the idealistic. But in a cinematic landscape saturated with franchises and multiverses, there is something profoundly radical about a movie that suggests the most heroic thing you can do is share a bowl of soup with a stranger.

If this is indeed the end of the road for Ken Loach, The Old Oak serves as a fitting benediction. It’s a film that asks us to look at the person standing next to us and see a human being instead of a political talking point. It’s stubborn, it’s loud, it’s deeply compassionate, and it reminds us that while the "K" might fall off the sign, the foundation can still hold if we’re willing to prop it up together. Don't wait for it to hit a streaming service and get buried in an algorithm; this one deserves your undivided attention.