‘Hard Truths’ Review: Mike Leigh’s Heartbreaking Drama

British director Mike Leigh’s return to domestic, working-class London after two successful side trips to the 19th century (2014’s Mr. Turner and 2018’s Peterloo) is titled Hard Truths. It’s a name that could apply to many of the great director’s films, most notably his Palme d’Or winner from 1996, Secrets & Lies. Although almost 30 years separate that film from Hard Truths, Leigh has lost none of his ability to effortlessly mine the mysterious emotional depths of his characters without sentimentality, comment, or even necessarily closure.

Secrets & Lies and Hard Truths have another thing in common: they both star the extraordinary Marianne Jean-Baptiste. And as good as the London-born Oscar nominee was as the middle-class Black woman struggling to reconnect with her past in Secrets & Lies, she’s absolutely volcanic, both in loudness and emotional effect, in Hard Truths. Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy, a late middle-aged Londoner whose anger at the world and everyone in it is expressed as a firehose of vitriolic hate and withering sarcasm that seems to have neither an origin point nor an end point. Her frantic and confused cries into the void of ineffable despair make the film — one of Leigh’s very best— more relatable than many of us would like to admit.

Depression That Manifests as Withering Sarcasm

Pansy is suffering — we’re never told what from, although we do witness its poisonous effects. She is Edvard Munch’s The Scream as a living, fire-breathing, post-Covid, suburban housewife. While her acidic put-downs are darkly humorous at first, we soon realize that her corrosive behavior is eating her alive. Leigh and his longtime cinematographer Dick Pope (who died in October 2024; Hard Truths was Pope’s final film) have chosen to chronicle Pansy’s toxic outbursts with a quiet, careful equanimity which only adds to the film’s power.

It seems that Pansy is only really at peace when she’s asleep, a welcome break from the crippling anxiety that ends with her waking up in a breathless panic. Thanks to Suzie Davies’ revealing production design, we see that the interior of Pansy’s two-story home is devoid of personality or even personal effects, as if she’s avoiding the temptation to angrily hurl a vase at the wall at the slightest provocation. So the targets of her wrath are her despondent husband, Curtley (a terrific David Webber), and their introverted 22-year-old son, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett).

Curtley and Moses sit at the dining room table looking beaten down by years of verbal abuse (“cheerful grinning people, can’t stand them,” is Pansy’s version of dinnertime conversation). Pansy’s barbs are most cruel to Moses, who sits in his bedroom dreaming of planes, presumably ones that would fly him away from a mother who angrily wonders, “don’t you have any hopes or dreams?” with no sense that her bottomless well of disapproval is likely the reason why he doesn’t.

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The Sadness Inside a Raging Daughter

As Pansy goes about her day, complaining to, and about, anyone within earshot — including furniture salespeople, supermarket cashiers, and random motorists — we wonder if she has any friends or family who’ll put up with her. She does, and it is Chantelle (a marvelous Michele Austin), Pansy’s hairdresser sister and behavioral opposite, who lovingly attends to her clients with a willing ear and a ready pat on the shoulder. Pansy and Michelle’s mother died five years ago and there’s a question about whether Pansy will accompany Chantelle to lay flowers on their mother’s grave. That’s one of the key conflicts in this otherwise loose film gently riding the unpredictable waves of life.

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The answer provides the tiniest crack in Pansy’s armor of ossified depression; when the sisters stand over the gravesite, Chantelle asks, “why can’t you enjoy life?” Pansy’s plaintive response is, “I don’t know.” That’s as good an answer as Leigh’s going to give us, but it transforms her from a character of morbid, often humorous, fascination to one of profound sadness.

Mike Leigh’s Unusual Filmmaking Style Pays Off

Per usual with Leigh, the actors worked on their characters for months prior to filming and, after extensive rehearsals, the director incorporates their ideas into a shooting script that is heavily improvised on set. This allows characters to emerge not from one mind but from the creative, selfless, and emotionally attuned minds of those playing them. In capturing these performances on film, Leigh is not so much curious, as curiosity suggests there is a question he’s trying to answer. Instead, Leigh is a supreme observer, often unwilling to let a character off the hook with an edit (see the stunning eight-minute oner in the diner in Secrets & Lies).

Scenes in Leigh’s working-class films can lope and meander, which serves to connect the characters’ quotidian experiences and familial dramas with our own. Hard Truths is yet another example of how Leigh’s highly unusual filmmaking style can yield such powerful results.

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Hard Truths is filled with victories that seem almost too minute to celebrate or even notice but actually have a heartbreaking effect. When a downcast and haunted Pansy visits Chantelle’s joyful home for a Mother’s Day meal, decades filled with clenched jaws and tense muscles are on the verge of annihilating her before a shocking moment of self-awareness arrives. When she steps into her empty, claustrophobic backyard, she does it gingerly, as if she’s about to set foot on an alien planet but she’s not sure if there’s enough oxygen. In the hands of Leigh and the magnificent Jean-Baptiste we feel every step of Pansy’s journey, one that doesn’t end with the film’s brilliant final shot but — we hope — begins with it.

Hard Truths, a co-production of Film4, Thin Man Films, The Mediapro Studio and Creativity Media and distributed by Bleecker Street, will be released in theaters nationwide starting January 10, 2025. See at Lincoln Center in New York.