'Hard Truths' review: Mike Leigh explores deep-seated anguish through darkly funny realism

Several times throughout Hard Truths, an unassuming English suburb becomes the site of a simmering domestic civil war, when the middle-aged Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is awoken from her nap and goes on a wordy, hilariously nasty rant about her neighbors. Her demanding husband Curtley (David Webber) is never surprised, and quietly accepts his wife’s latest venomous tirade, knowing full well that he could be its next target.

Kitchen-sink realist Mike Leigh, now in his eighties, may have come to the bitter realization that at a certain point, some things (and people) may never change. However, with his latest social drama, he paints an acerbic and empathetic portrait of what hitting your limit looks like. The film, and Jean-Baptiste’s rankled performance as a wife and mother who just can’t catch a break, seem to exist just beyond an invisible point of no return — a line that Hard Truths walks with stunning precision.

What is Hard Truths about?

While her husband is away at his plumbing job, and while her unemployed 22-year-old son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) is locked away in his bedroom, the dispirited fifty-something Pansy likes to clean — perhaps a little too much — if only to create a temporary sanctuary for herself, where she can nap without having to worry about the outside world.

This paradise never lasts. The real world always comes knocking sooner or later, whether in the form of a stray fox in her yard or the men in her life asking for their next meal. The next inconvenience to her, and her next vicious speech about the state of the world and its selfish people, are always just moments away, and she wants it all to stop. 

There’s a quote from the TV series Justified that has since become a common truism: “If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.” It is, on the surface, applicable to Pansy and how she navigates the world — her sharp barbs at innocent strangers in public, while funny, are a sudden and irreverent release valve — leaving people to walk on eggshells when she’s around. But it isn’t quite so simple and binary; in reality, everyone is an asshole to some degree. Pansy is ready to snap at a moment’s notice, but she wasn’t born this way. Something or someone (perhaps multiple somethings and someones) molded her over time, an idea that Leigh slowly unveils and explores over the course of 97 minutes.

But before there’s ever a hint of Pansy’s real psychology, the film also presents an upbeat contrast across several scenes, in the form of her hairdresser sister Chantal (Michele Austin) and the parallel life she lives. Chantal, a single mother, lives with her two adult daughters, young professionals Kayla (Ani Nelson) and Aleisha (Sophia Brown), in a cramped apartment filled with love and cheer. Through scenes that follow both sisters across daily interactions, Hard Truths details how people on the same journey can end up in remarkably different destinations, living lives in which they put out into the world that which they receive — or perceive, or think they deserve.

As Mother’s Day approaches, both women’s lives as homemakers shift slowly into focus, but they also plan to visit their mother’s grave, a scenario that proves surprisingly emotionally charged. Whatever Pansy’s problem with the idea, she first and foremost makes excuses. “I’m a sick woman!” she yells at Chantal, before darting off into an unrelated rant about how she doesn’t plan things in advance.

As the holiday nears, isolated scenes focused on all the aforementioned characters — Pansy, Curtley, Moses, Chantal, Kayla and Aleisha — paint a multifaceted family portrait that, eventually, helps unearth the deep anguish that lies beneath Pansy’s risible demeanor.

Hard Truths is about the ins and outs of Black women’s lives.

What makes Leigh’s film such a joyful watch is its vignette-like approach to both families, though it eventually sharpens its focus when digging into difficult emotional territory. Several of these scenes are set at Chantal’s hair salon, following daily gossip that sketches out the details of her life, and those of her clients, all of them middle-aged Black women dealing with the daily drudgery of life. However, their sense of community keeps them afloat.

Leigh, on numerous occasions, cuts from the noisy hustle and bustle of the salon to the eerie silence of Pansy’s home, a contrast that lures the viewer into her orbit before she launches into her next series of condemnations — even against dogs, babies, and so on. She’s pissed off with the world at large, doesn’t have the tools to deal with it, and ignores any kind of support she’s offered.

The characters’ communal instincts are also accompanied by specific cultural details, which speak to the movie’s granular nature. These are women who all appear to belong to England’s Caribbean diaspora; they might speak with English accents, but on occasion, they code-switch to the occasional Patois or West Indian intonation, which tells its own story too. For Chantal, her clients, and her daughters, this switch usually occurs during laughter, or during the lively recounting of stories. But in Pansy’s case, code-switching is a means of tapping into more creative insults, and into furious, lock-jawed responses to the mundane, as the film seats its jet-black humor right next to its notions of people’s deep and complicated personal history.

There also exists a sense of pride in achievement for these characters, and of pushing one’s children to be their best selves. Chantal has ostensibly succeeded at this with her well-adjusted daughters, who enjoy varying levels of success (though they still hide their failures from their mum, and from one another). Moses, on the other hand, represents the flip side to this story. He seems aimless, and spends all his time eating, making a mess, playing video games, and reading books about airplanes. Apart from his occasional strolls, he barely leaves the house, and lacks professional prospects. All Pansy does is yell at him in the hopes of motivating him, but deep down, she thinks he may be a lost cause.

Pansy even describes his behavior to Chantal in dismissive terms — his fixations, his social awkwardness, and his inability to maintain eye contact in particular — that hint towards Moses being on the autism spectrum, or having some kind of cognitive disability that his parents cannot or do not recognize. But even Pansy’s love as a mother can (and will) only go so far, given the harshness of her own upbringing by a disciplinarian single mother.

Hard Truths centers on a tremendous lead performance.

Teaming with Leigh for the first time since 1996’s Secrets & Lies — a role that won her a Best Supporting Actress nomination at the Oscars, BAFTAs, and Golden Globes — Jean-Baptiste delivers career-best work in what may be one of the most challenging performances this year. The biggest challenge for both actress and director is maintaining a familiar sense of humanity during even verbose, borderline Shakespearean outbursts about how much Pansy loathes the world — and by implication, what it has done to her.

Each and every actor delivers fine-tuned work, as characters swallowed up by Pansy’s orbit (and in the case of Curtley and Moses, characters who have contributed to the black hole at her center). But Jean-Baptiste is a magnet for the camera, luring it in with her eyes, and making it watch — unblinking, unbroken — as she puts on a clinic of self-loathing turned outward.

A volatile undercurrent runs just beneath Jean-Baptiste’s physical being, leaving Pansy on the verge of either explosion or implosion. Sometimes, she reaches both these difficult places at once, as the camera interrogates her, practically forcing confessions from her about what made her this way. The more Leigh lingers, holding back on any sort of formalist flourish, the more he allows his performances to take charge. The result is mesmerizing to watch, and sure to remind you of the worst flashes you might have seen of friends and loved ones.

In the process, Hard Truths becomes a complex showreel for humanity at its most bitter and pained, with characters forced to turn inward and at least recognize (if not introspect and improve upon) the worst corners of themselves. Through long, unbroken close-ups and scenes of familial interaction in which tensions subtly build, Leigh’s stark naturalism is brought slowly and fiercely to the fore by an accomplished actress at the height of her power, and at the height of her vulnerability. Scene by scene, she slowly chips away at Pansy’s armor until all that’s left is sinew, blood, and bone, leaving her exposed to the world in all its cruelty and kindness and indifference. It’s harrowing to watch, but Jean-Baptiste makes it impossible to look away. 

Hard Truths will have a qualifying run in New York City on Dec. 6 before opening in limited release Jan. 10, 2025.

UPDATE: Sep. 25, 2024, 4:33 p.m. EDT Hard Truths was reviewed on Sept. 9, 2024 out of its World Premiere at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. This post has been updated to toast its New York Film Festival premiere.