Hard Truths must be Mike Leigh’s most straightforwardly enjoyable movie since Topsy Turvy. Which is probably all kinds of wrong, since it’s about a woman in the grip of a depression so profound and persistent that she’s almost learned how to live with it.
Leigh likes these pithy titles – High Hopes, Life Is Sweet, Naked – and Topsy Turvy is an outlier in his work, being a quasi-musical about the partnership of British operetta powerhouses Gilbert and Sullivan. Hard Truths is more the Leigh we expect – working class, a bit dour, a kernel of something tasty in there, fabulous performances.
For all the genuinely great acting on display here, it’s Marianne Jean-Baptiste everyone orbits. Her Pansy (what a name) is a rancid curmudgeon. Shouting at people in shops, bellowing at the doctor, yelling at the dentist, at her mother dead in her grave, Pansy is a woman obsessed with life disappointments. She’s so rude it’s funny. I have to pause here to point out what a strange film this is – it’s not, repeat not, a comedy and yet Jean-Baptiste’s performance, raging, almost falling over herself in her fury at times, is incredibly funny, force-of-nature stuff. Pansy’s accent – Black London veering occasionally, like a car leaving its lane, into West Indian – says it all about a woman who loses it every time the tiniest little thing comes up.
Around Pansy her family, her mopey, overweight son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), probably depressed too. Her husband Curtley (David Webber), long-suffering, eye-rolling, exasperated, possibly running out of excuses for staying with his wife. Pansy’s hairdresser sister and total opposite, Chantelle (Michelle Austin) is people-facing, gregarious and robust enough to take a few knocks without everything falling apart. Chantelle’s two bright spark daughters, Kayla (Ani Nelson) and Aleisha (Sophia Brown) – is this what Chantelle and Pansy were like when they were young? And if so, what happened to Pansy?
Leigh’s famous working method – workshopping characters with his actors and developing a story from there – often results in not much to grab hold of for plot fans. There is even less than usual here. A trip to the sisters’ mother’s grave for Chantelle and Pansy, which Pansy doesn’t want to make. A family lunch at Chanetlle’s where things come to a head.
The children are clearly chips off the old block – Aleisha and Kayla the positive, funny and fun mother’s daughters, Moses the introverted lad spending too much time in his room listening to music on headphones worn like a statement or warning.
The implication, surely, is that mental states – ways of coping with the world – tend to be passed down one generation to another. That’s depressing, but Leigh gives us a glimmer of hope right near the end, in a strange scene featuring Moses in Piccadilly Circus, in the very centre of London, where he’s gone to get lost in the crowd.
It flies by. Somehow Leigh has managed to come up with a way of portraying depression, anxiety, social phobia – “health issues” as Pansy calls them – without being bogged down by them. This film does not wallow, which Leigh’s films sometimes do (I’m thinking of Vera Drake). This is the Mike Leigh film for people who don’t like Mike Leigh films.
The performances are light as air – I particularly liked Webber as Curtley, wringing moments of exquisite pathos from a role that’s not much more than a spear carrier. Austin, more obviously, is superb, though everyone here knows that Hard Truths is a vehicle for MJB, who hasn’t worked with Mike Leigh in front of the camera since Secrets & Lies, another of his very best. No coincidence, surely.
Hard Truths – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
