01/02/25

Cineworld, Edinburgh

It’s been quite some time since we had a new film from Mike Leigh. His last, 2018’s Peterloo, made for Amazon, was an attempt to transfer his inimitable style onto a bigger canvas and the results were somewhat mixed. With Hard Truths, he’s back on what feels like his home turf, in one of his intimate, unflinching examinations of the human condition.

Pansy (Marianne Jean Baptiste) is in a bad way. Plagued by awful nightmares, she’s not a great deal happier when awake and is prone to unleashing her acid tongue on anybody unlucky enough to cross her path. Her regular targets include her monosyllabic husband, Curtley (David Webber), and her disaffected son, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), who has taken to reading children’s picture books and blocking out sound with his headphones, while she snarls and raves. And there are plenty of others who find themselves targets for a tongue-lashing: various shop workers, luckless members of the public… even the girl at the supermarket till is told to ‘do something about her face.’

Pansy’s sister, Chantelle (Michele Austin), is her polar opposite. A hairdresser by trade, she has a warm, sunny disposition, always up for a giggle and a gossip, and she has raised her two daughters, Kayla (Ani Nelson) and Aleisha (Sophia Brown), to have the same happy-go-lucky approach to life, even when their own work situations are sometimes challenging.

As the anniversary of Pansy and Chantelle’s mother’s death approaches, a family get-together is planned but making things work with Pansy’s forbidding ‘ghost-at-the-feast’ presence is going to prove a tall order…

This feels like a classic Mike Leigh project and, as ever, his unique approach to filmmaking yields remarkable results. Both Jean Baptiste and Austin offer extraordinarily affecting performances in the lead roles, but the film is more than just a simple two-hander, with all the subsidiary characters beautifully delineated in a series of short set-pieces. Leigh handles a large cast with his customary skill: neither Webber and Barrett is given much in the way of dialogue, but their despair is written large in their desperate sidelong glances. And watch out for Samantha Spiro in a deliciously unpleasant cameo as Kayla’s employer, Nicole.

It’s fascinating to experience the film’s transformation, from the early scenes which are somehow caustically funny (and which have already spawned some internet memes) into a confrontation so utterly heartrending that I find my eyes involuntarily filling up with tears. Hard Truths won’t be for everyone. There’s a devastating melancholy at the heart of this film that seems to seep from the screen, and some of the later scenes make for harrowing viewing. But it’s proof if ever it were needed that Leigh is a unique filmmaker, who has always allowed his actors the creative freedom to explore their characters and in the process, yield extraordinary results.

4.4 stars

Philip Caveney