Directed by Mike Leigh, Reviewed by Paul Sorrell

One thing we can be sure of when viewing a Mike Leigh film is that it won’t be a comfortable experience. Hard Truths is more unsettling than most. While the title suggests there will be some tough lessons to be learned, they are not presented to us on a plate.

The small cast is nearly all members of one extended Black family in London. Leigh’s approach, as in his other films, is to draw parallels and contrasts between individuals and groups and leave us to work out what it all means.

Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is a deeply unhappy woman who is aggressive to everyone she meets, escalating conflict out of thin air. Her husband Curtley and her son Moses bear the brunt of her relentless abuse. Moses (22) may be on the autism spectrum, but his mother’s behaviour is enough to motivate his withdrawal. While she berates him for lacking ambition, her own depression keeps her in bed all day. Curtley retreats into an impotent passivity, mute with grief, his face a mask of pain and helplessness.

Pansy’s sister Chantelle is her polar opposite — cheerful, optimistic, delighting in her two twenty-something daughters (who, like Moses, live at home) and a chatty confidante to the customers in her busy hair salon. The colour and clutter of their home contrasts with the sterile environment and minimalist décor of Pansy’s place. In the only really joyful scene in the film, Chantelle and her daughters engage in some delightful playfulnesss, teasing and cavorting in a way that is unthinkable for Pansy and her family.

A window of hope opens when Chantelle cajoles Pansy into visiting their mother’s grave on Mother’s Day. But although a glimmer of the truth of her situation breaks through, Pansy pulls her defences back around her like a thick blanket. Her dysfunction seems too embedded to shift, even a little. Pansy’s obsessive cleanliness and avoidance of dirt, plants and animals is symbolic of the ironclad cell she has built inside herself to anaesthetise even the possibility of feelings.

In his films Leigh shows how human relationships work to build people up, or tear them down. Hard Truths seems unrelentingly bleak. Leigh bats his tough questions back to us, treating us as compassionate collaborators rather than passive viewers. He encourages us to bring our own life experiences to Pansy’s story, and to look deeper and harder at our own attitudes and relationships.

Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 303 May 2025: 28