The future for the last remaining pub, The Old Oak, in a village of Northeast England, where people are leaving the land as the mines are closed. Houses are cheap and available, thus making it an ideal location for Syrian refugees.
Ken Loach’s latest and probably his last film is his third film in a row set in the North East of England, and it touches on many of the same themes that he’s explored throughout his career. In the case of ‘The Old Oak’ we follow pub landlord TJ Ballantyne (Dave Turner), who runs the ailing pub of the title in a rundown former mining village. He finds himself drawn into a conflict with his regulars when they react negatively to the placement of a group of Syrian refugees in the village, exacerbated when TJ befriends one of the refugees, Yara (Ebla Mari).
I suspect most readers will have seen several Ken Loach films by now so you know what to expect – lack of nuance, blunt politics and central characters so good they may as well be angelic. You get all that, but you also get a lot of heart and a keen eye for the working classes and the issues that affect their lives. In the case of ‘The Old Oak’, it has all of those qualities and yet I warmed to it all the same and was willing to look past pretty much every obvious development (with one obvious, horrible and unnecessary exception). I think it’s largely because of the characters of TJ and Yara who are well written and well played, Turner playing TJ as a man striving to keep going despite all live has thrown at him, and Mari playing Yara as hopeful in a world where she has every right to not be. It has an unearned final sequence that doesn’t ring true and some back of a fag packet takes on racism, but the heart is what has kept me coming back to Ken Loach’s films time and time again and it has done so again.
‘The Old Oak’ won’t go down as one of Ken Loach’s all time classics, but as a distillation of the themes he’s explored over the course of his lengthy career, I thought it was a fitting send off, if indeed it is.
Rating: 4/5
Directed By: Ken Loach
Starring: Dave Turner, Ebla Mari and Claire Rodgerson
'I have a purpose. If you think that it's some kind of blessing it's not. It means I have an obligation to see a very specific thing through.' Marty Supreme (2025) 