After two historical epics, Mr Turner (2014) and Peterloo (2018), director Mike Leigh returns to his natural stomping ground: the everyday reality of British working-class life. With Hard Truths, he once again delivers an unflinching social drama, though it will do little to change the tedious, well-rehearsed criticisms of his work.
Leigh’s detractors accuse him of wallowing in misery, reducing his working-class characters to crass caricatures with ‘funny voices’ and no aspirations beyond survival. The portrayal in Hard Truths of a working-class woman suffering from what appears to be clinical depression will no doubt add more fuel to such lazy, off-the-peg dismissals.
But such critiques miss the point of his films entirely. Unlike Ken Loach, Leigh isn’t in the business of turning characters into ventriloquist mouthpieces for a dreary leftist politics. His great strength has always been his ability to sense the shifting social and political winds, capturing the way they shape working-class consciousness. That so many reviews of Hard Truths fixate on the psychological state of its protagonist, Pansy Deacon, rather than the wider social forces at play, shows just how rare a perspective like Leigh’s is in the arts nowadays. Social criticism seems to fly over the film critics’ heads.
Leigh reunites with the star of Secrets and Lies (1996), Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who delivers a traffic-stopping performance as Pansy, a woman teetering on the brink of a nervous breakdown. She is irascible, bitter and at times unbearable. Jean-Baptiste is mesmerising, delivering a performance so powerful it deserves to sweep every acting gong going.
Crucially, Pansy’s suffering is not simply personal. Leigh has always rejected the notion that individuals can ‘think’ their way out of their social circumstances with the right mindset. Calls to ‘get happy’ or ‘pull yourself together’ mean nothing when the very fabric of working-class life is being shredded beneath you.
In this sense, Hard Truths shares a kinship with Zadie Smith’s 2012 novel, NW. Beyond their shared setting of north-west London, both works explore the crumbling of social bonds among working-class Londoners, and the loneliness and disconnection that festers when communities become fragmented and hollowed out. Hard Truths might as well be called ‘Anomie in the UK’. It’s a devastating account of what happens when social life contracts, leaving people trapped in their homes, isolated and adrift.
Much of Pansy’s anger is directed at her husband, Curtley, and son, Moses, who loaf around the house expecting her to pick up after them. Her frustration echoes Betty Friedan’s ‘problem with no name’ – the soul-crushing dissatisfaction so many women experience when relegated to domestic drudgery with no role outside the home. Pansy is terrified of the outside world, but is equally suffocated within her own four walls. Leigh masterfully exposes how the retreat into family life, often seen as a haven from a tough world, can just as easily become a prison. It’s a theme he explored in Life Is Sweet (1991), but here, the message is even starker.
Moses, meanwhile, epitomises social decline. His speech is monosyllabic. He’s an unemployed gamer with no mates, no ambitions and no future. He’s not some brooding, misunderstood youth – he’s a symptom of a society that no longer integrates young men into work and social life nor initiates them into adulthood. By contrast, his cousins, Kayla (Ani Nelson) and Aliesha (Sophia Brown), radiate charm and confidence because they are engaged in the world. They work, they go out, they experience life beyond the four walls of their parents’ homes. The contrast between them and Moses isn’t down to their individual personalities – it’s a reflection of who has been given the opportunity to become an adult.
Leigh and his cast capture black working-class London life with remarkable authenticity – and without shoehorning in the usual clichés about oppression and injustice. The film makes only a passing nod to racism, when Pansy worries that Moses loitering around town could make him a target for the police. But this is no polemic about ‘systemic’ or ‘institutional’ racism. Leigh is interested in something deeper: the growing detachment of the working class from wider society – a problem that cuts across racial lines. Notably, the Deacon family is disconnected from the black church, an institution that has historically provided community, stability and meaning. Instead, they are left isolated.
Hard Truths is not merely a psychological drama. It is a pointed critique of modern atomisation, where individuals are left to fend for themselves in a society that no longer offers them a place.
Leigh understands that class is not just about income – it’s about the conditions that shape how people experience the world. And in chronicling those shifting conditions, he remains, as ever, Britain’s foremost observer of working-class life.
Neil Davenport is a writer based in London.
Watch the trailer for Hard Truths here:
