The first trailer for Ken Loach’s latest film, Sorry We Missed You, has been released. The film is a tonal and topical follow-up to his previous feature, I, Daniel Blake, and tackles the impact of working in the gig economy on families. It premiered at the Cannes film festival in May.

Sorry We Missed You stars Kris Hitchen as a builder whose employment prospects plummeted after the 2008 financial crisis and who is persuaded to work on a freelance – yet perilously indebted – basis for a major delivery company. His wife (Debbie Honeywood) is a contract nurse and in-home carer to elderly and disabled people. Both are under enormous pressure during the day at work, and again at night, dealing with their troubled son and his sister.

Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw described the work as “fierce, open and angry, unironised and unadorned”. In Cannes, Loach blamed the new way of working depicted in his film on the shoulders of “fake left” politicans such as Tony Blair, whose brand of “caring capitalism” he says resulted in rising job insecurity.

In 2016, Loach won the Palme d’Or for I, Daniel Blake, a story of a carpenter with a heart condition struggling to negotiate the benefits system. The film became the director’s biggest commercial hit and was felt to have highlighted for many the difficulties of claiming universal credit.

Sorry We Missed You will be released in the UK on 1 November.