With a body of work that includes gritty fare like the distressing Cathy Come Home, the grim Ladybird Ladybird and moving masterpiece Kes, Ken Loach’s output is justifiably described as dour by many. He tends to focus on Britain’s working classes, highlighting their struggles.

Though his works are not without humour, Loach’s latest offering has a lightness of tone that makes it stand apart from his darker fare. It’s an intriguing collaboration with eccentric former Manchester United footballer Eric Cantona.

Eric Bishop (Steve Evets) is a kind-hearted postman whose life is reaching crisis-point.

A single father to two teenage stepsons who are heading dangerously towards to derailment, Eric struggles to deal with running a home and holding down a job.

At the same time, he has to attempt to exert some control over two wayward boys who treat him with an increasing amount of disrespect.

As a result of his situation, he is fighting against a downward spiral that will lead into depression. The odds don’t look good: his second wife has walked out and his first lost love is playing on his mind. So football fan Eric turns to drinking alcohol and smoking weed.

When he also starts talking to his hero Eric Cantona about his problems, you start to think he’s really cracking up. But just as it seems it’s all going to end with tragic consequences, the support Eric receives from Cantona’s imagined presence eventually pulls him out of the mire.

The blending of magic realism with his trademark gritty realism is something of a departure for Ken Loach.

And while comic elements do indeed exist in much of his previous work, the humour present in Looking For Eric is much broader, leading to an extraordinary, if at times uneasy, collision of tragic elements with comedy moments that verge on the farcical.

It threatens to topple into the darkest and most tear-jerking of tragedies on several occasions before finally morphing into a life-affirming tale with an upbeat ending.

Steve Evets gives a heart-rending performance as the put-upon step-dad mired in dejection while Cantona is hugely appealing with his self-deprecating, self-referential turn.

A supremely talented cast which includes the lovely Stephanie Bishop as Eric’s lost love Lily, former Coronation Street star

Lucy-Jo Hudson as Eric’s daughter Sam and Early Doors star John Henshaw, who heads up the hilarious group of Eric’s postal-worker colleagues, makes this beguiling bitter-sweet film a must-see.

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