Hard Truths shows what it’s like to be angry but hurting inside

British filmmaker Mike Leigh’s new movie about a woman caught between depression and rage has something to say about people who are secretly in pain.

Hard Truths stars Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Michele Austin

“Stuff happens when I go out,’’ Pansy (an extraordinary Marianne Jean-Baptiste) tells her sister Chantelle (Michele Austin) at a pivotal moment in the contemporary drama Hard Truths, written and directed by veteran British filmmaker Mike Leigh.

“What stuff?’’ asks Chantelle, who at 53 is a few years younger than Pansy, and far happier. “People,’’ her sister replies.

This goes to the core of Pansy’s overbearing, abrasive, alienating attitude but does not explain the cause of it. We have to wait for that. When it comes it is unsettling.

The setting is London and Pansy and Chantelle, a hairdresser, and their families are middle class. Chantelle, full of laughter and good cheer, is single and has two adult daughters, one in law school, the other working for a skin care company.

In the opening scenes we see Pansy being rude to her taciturn plumber husband Curtley (David Webber), their 22-year-old son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), who still lives at home and seems to have no friends, and anyone else she meets when she does leave the house.

She berates her doctor and dentist, insults people in the supermarket check-out queue — “You’re standing there like an ostrich,’’ she tells a tall white woman — and almost has a fight with a man in the car park. There is no barrier between what she thinks and what she says.

Initially this has comic moments, akin to take-no-prisoners Larry David in the 1999-2024 television series Curb Your Enthusiasm, but it soon becomes overbearing, for Pansy and everyone around her. The director, whose 1971 debut feature is titled Bleak Moments, is not known for comedies.

Pansy is caught, almost immobilised, between depression and rage. She is unwell and needs help. It’s not forthcoming from her husband or son, who are zombie-like in her presence. They do not want to ask questions that they fear will lead to hard truths.

She has turned her home into a cage, as Germaine Greer put it in The Female Eunuch (1970), and she is shutting down behind those self-imposed bars. She sleeps a lot and when she wakes she lets out a cry of alarm.

Jean-Baptiste is amazing as this shouty, judgmental, frightened, lonely woman. She was Oscar nominated for Leigh’s 1996 film Secrets and Lies and in this film, too, she delivers a performance for the ages. Austin is terrific as the counterpoint sister.

When Chantelle and the reluctant, pissed-off Pansy visit their mother’s grave on Mother’s Day, the younger sister momentarily loses it.

“Why can’t you enjoy life?” she asks. Pansy stops shouting and quietly answers, “I don’t know.’’

Then she thinks, pares back and opens up. It is a remarkable scene in this sombre, poignant film centred on someone who carries a weight that others cannot see; partly because she hides it, partly because they don’t want to look.

The final moment is not what we’re used to seeing in the cinema, and as such it perhaps encapsulates the hardest truth of all.

Hard Truths (M)

97 minutes

In cinemas

★★★½