‘Hard Truths’ review: quiet devastation and laugh-out-loud rants from legendary director Mike Leigh

“What’s a baby got pockets for? What’s it going to keep in its pocket, a knife?” Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) delivers this pithy observation during an erratic dinner table rant in which she also rails against “grinning, cheerful charity workers” as well as dogs “sweating” and “stinking” beneath plastic winter coats. The whole time, her glum husband Curtley (David Webber) and near-silent son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) avoid eye contact and focus on eating their meal. Like much of this quietly heartbreaking film, it’s very funny but also pretty bleak.

Hard Truths is Jean-Baptiste’s second on-screen collaboration with Mike Leigh, the veteran director who has honed his own unique film-making method over 50 years. Leigh never gives his actors a script; instead they build each character and interaction from scratch through a rigorous period of rehearsal and improvisation. In Leigh’s 1996 masterpiece Secrets & Lies, Jean-Baptiste gave a brilliant, Oscar-nominated performance as Hortense, a middle-class Black optometrist who discovers that her birth mother is a working-class white woman with nerves as frayed as a tatty old rug.

Jean-Baptiste has already earned a BAFTA nomination for her Hard Truths performance and deserves to crack the Oscars’ Best Actress shortlist too. She’s tremendous as Pansy, a middle-aged woman living in suburban north London whose default setting is fast (to argue) and furious. She picks fights with a stranger in a car park, a sofa shop sales assistant and two women behind her in a supermarket queue, but seems drained after each altercation. As the film progresses, Leigh and Jean-Baptiste skilfully peel back the layers to reveal that Pansy’s anger is really a manifestation of her deep-rooted depression. She lashes out at the world because she’s terrified of it.

Pansy’s son and husband seem too traumatised by her to offer any help but her big-hearted sister Chantelle (Michele Austin, excellent in her fourth Leigh film) tries to provide emotional support. During a trip to their mother’s grave, the sisters’ conflicting childhood memories offer clues as to why their personalities are so different. Whereas Pansy is spiky and isolated, Chantelle excels at her public-facing job as a hairdresser and has two outgoing daughters, Kayla (Ani Nelson) and Aleisha (Sophia Brown), whom she seems close to.

But Hard Truths never really explains how Pansy became a raging wreck. Like many of Leigh’s best films, it prioritises authenticity and recognisable glimpses of emotion over a splashy narrative arc. That may make it a little frustrating for some viewers but there’s no doubt that Leigh and his cast have created a sad, captivating, fascinating slice of everyday life. Hard Truths offers no easy answers but few films reveal as much about the human condition. You may even find yourself agreeing with some of Pansy’s rants – what has a baby got pockets for, anyway?

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