THE OLD OAK is a touching reminder of our shared humanity at a time of crises that affect individuals and communication due to local, national, and international challenges of identity, status, and belonging.
The holiday this time of year provides stacks of opportunities to try and not do very much and, in some cases, find the time to enjoy the arts and cinema when the rest of the year is so busy. I was able to watch the recently released film The Old Oak by the incredibly influential director Ken Loach last night, and I want to take this opportunity to think about what I saw and felt. Nowadays, I find it very hard to literally fix my eyes on the screen when watching anything coming out of Hollywood specifically aimed at entertaining me through some action-content-specific film because everything moves at 100 miles an hour, and it’s difficult to concentrate when certainly there is no real story and character building is entirely amiss.
The Old Oak suffers from none of this. It is set in northern England in 2016, arguably just before the Brexit vote. The closure of the coal mines during the 1980s decimated small towns and villages. Margaret Thatcher and her policies of monetarism, privatisation, and neoliberal globalisation meant that traditional industrial sectors were being wiped out overnight due to the London-centric thinking that dominated the policy framework throughout the 1980s. The film is indeed a moving story of understanding the implications of the crisis of capitalism and the shrinking of government to support those who have been ‘left behind’, not by their own means but because of various policy implementations that have left communities to suffer effectively on their own with little or no support.
The tension in the film is positioned around the declining fortunes of a community pub where families and communities once centred and established their identities. All of that is seemingly thrown into disarray with the arrival of Syrian refugees, who are being housed in local areas that have faced considerable dilapidation and decline overall. On one side, there are the existing communities that face a precarious future due to their ill health, poor incomes, and limited opportunities for social mobility. On the other side, there are the refugees, who are somehow being provided prospects that have been denied to those existing communities.
The film also exposes tensions within the indigenous British communities themselves. Some view the arrival of refugees in highly racialised terms, seeing them as a risk to the very fabric of their own identities, with all of the stereotypes and misunderstandings around issues of extremism and Muslim women wearing the veil. However, there are also many who understand that these Syrians have faced horrific conditions and arrived with nothing, so the only human and decent response is to share what little they have.
Some of the dialogue touches on the pain both communities feel—the constant hope for better days ahead while knowing that wider forces continue to work against them, limiting their agency over their own lives and futures. Yet the film’s message seems to be that, despite having nothing, they can find strength and hope in each other. When communities come together in times of hardship, they discover they have everything.
The pace of the film is slow, but not dull. The dialogue feels heavy, but not agonizing. The tensions come across as realistic rather than exaggerated. And the expressions of love between people ring true. The film paints a detailed picture of contrasting groups that ultimately share a common humanity.
As a scholar focusing on conflict and identity, I found The Old Oak to be quite poignant yet empowering. It shows how even severe social issues need not be intractable when we tap into the goodness and hope within human nature, moving beyond limited mindsets to see the bigger picture. Here we have two communities facing challenges that may well perish separately but could come together and thrive. If a wider society could emulate such aspirations, we might move past the “divide and rule” mentalities that allow self-interested elites to cling to power. But it takes courage, initiative, and education—and that seems to be the film’s lesson to us all.
With The Old Oak, Ken Loach cements his reputation as one of Britain’s most important filmmakers, capturing the struggles of the human condition with special attention to working-class communities. Now 87 years old, we can hope he still has one or two films left in him.