Hard Truths

Hard Truths is a hard watch. Nonetheless, Mike Leigh’s latest is simultaneously heart-warming, funny, truthful and truly sad.

Leigh brilliantly puts the human condition on the screen in this family drama, set over the course of a few days in suburban London.

There’s no grand sweeping narrative and no redemption arc, just a tight and razor sharp script and a film that unspools almost like a play.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste really should have been Oscar-nominated for her performance here. Her character Pansy can’t articulate her depression and sadness and pushes away those closest to her. She’ll make you laugh, cringe, wince and cry within the span of a single scene at times.

The pace is deliberately slow and the absence of easy answers and a path forward won’t be to some tastes.

Leigh occasionally uses an orchestral piece of music to transition between scenes but the drama mainly plays out realistically and, as mentioned, akin to how it would on a stage.

Likewise, Leigh doesn’t augment proceedings with any sort of fancy cinematography and the film largely takes on the feel of a cheap BBC drama visually.

Whilst these two elements are perhaps what's missing to push this film up to the heights of masterpiece or essential cinema, the heart of this is those performances, those words and those emotions so tangibly put onto the screen.

It is a film full of feeling and is all the more moving for how real it feels.

Not an easy watch, but all the better for that.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️