Like many of Mike Leigh’s films, Hard Truths is both extremely well-done and tormenting to watch. It always surprises me that Leigh’s cinematic portraits of British working-class life are often considered to be quite funny in a bleak sort of way. Hard Truths, for example, is generating laughs for the quality of insults cast by the main character, Pansy Deacon (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), who is in a compulsive and perpetual rage at life, spewing abuse at family members as well as any unfortunate neighbor or service person or total stranger who happens to cross her path.

I couldn’t laugh at any of it. Even while recognizing the quality of the filmmaking, my response is more like that of Pansy’s husband, Curtley (David Webber), or her son, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), who sit in a numb state of endurance under the lash of her fury, waiting for their chance to escape.

It all depends, I guess, on your own experience in relation to deeply scarred families of the working class. If you’ve been in one, it’s tough to laugh. In order to find it funny, you’d probably need a filmmaker who’s a lot wittier in a gallows-humor sort of way than Leigh tends to be. Just Pansy shouting, “You look like an ostrich!” to a tall young woman who tries to intercede when Pansy begins to abuse a checkout clerk for no apparent reason isn’t going to do it.

Hard Truths begins and ends with the same shot of a nice middle-class house in the suburbs where this in-depth study of one disturbed black family will take place. It’s Pansy’s house, and the repetition of that shot closes you with a dreadful, implacable sense of stasis. It would take a miracle to change the grim family dynamic enclosed in that house.

Pansy’s husband, Curtley, is a plumber who owns his own business and is clearly successful enough that neither Pansy or Moses, an apathetic and overweight young man of twenty-two, has to work for a living. The house is kept so shining clean, so spare, so rigidly arranged, its superficial “niceness” gives way immediately to an airless feeling of entrapment. Even Pansy feels it, opening the patio door just a crack in order to breathe in some fresh air from the threatening outdoors. Her pitiful backyard beyond is grimly tidy and treeless, a garden-free square of lawn edged by concrete and tall fencing.

Pansy has a horror of dirt that extends to any kind of life, all of which she considers “disgusting.” Animals, plants, humans: all very messy. The scene in which she unwraps a bouquet of flowers — a belated Mother’s Day gift from her son — and puts it in a vase of water, all with a scowl of repugnance as if she were handling something both filthy and menacing, is typical. It’s a great concession that she’ll allow the flowers to remain in the house at all.

Of course, Pansy’s entrenched hostility is rooted in fear, which we recognize in the first scene when she wakes up from a nightmare with a yelp of fright. This is a woman who is always so tired from trying to manage her roiling emotions, she spends a lot of her daylight hours in bed or on the sofa, hopelessly trying to catch up on sleep. That she’s suffering from dire depression is also clear, though she doesn’t have that well-known depressive tendency to swallow anger, which when it turns inward transmutes into overwhelming sadness and angst. But her spewing anger doesn’t seem to give her any relief — it just creates a chain reaction of more and bigger eruptions.

The only person who seems able to handle Pansy without shutting down or fleeing from her or shouting back in contesting rage is her sister Chantelle (Michele Austin), her temperamental opposite. Chantelle is kindly, patient, humorous, and popular. She’s a hard-working single mother and bears her burdens lightly. Her sunny daughters join her in spontaneously fond sessions of mutual teasing and laughter. Her clients at the hair salon tell her all their troubles and clearly rely on her genuine concern.

Any study of troubled families tends to be a bit confounding for the way siblings have such different memories and reactions to what is apparently the same childhood history. But it never is the same, really. Pansy, the eldest, is filled with resentment toward her mother, who was deserted by her husband and had to go to work full-time, deputizing Pansy as the person in charge of the household in her absence. That included looking after her younger sister, Chantelle. In Pansy’s view, Chantelle has always had it easy compared to her.

Which is why, when Chantelle wants them both to visit their mother’s grave on Mother’s Day, Pansy heaps scorn upon the idea of exhibitionist mourning and refuses to say whether she’ll actually go or not. When Mother’s Day arrives, it’s the climactic sequence representing entrenched family hell, with Pansy’s miserable nuclear family presenting a silent, obdurate challenge to Chantelle’s lively, practical, sympathetic one.

Like most Mike Leigh films, this one is extremely well-acted and emotionally powerful. The director’s well-known practice of working out characters, plot events, and dialogue with the actors in weeks of improvisational rehearsal and intensive collaboration that becomes the basis for the eventual script has long proven to be effective. At age eighty-one, Leigh is as capable as ever, which makes it lamentable to read interviews in which he discusses how hard it’s become to get financing for his films, even for extremely small-scale, low-budget ones like Hard Truths. Leigh’s last film was the historical epic Peterloo (2018), which bombed at the box office.

Still, you’d think seven Academy Award nominations for directing and screenwriting over forty-plus years would get Leigh guaranteed funding for low-budget films at least, especially for a reunion of Leigh with his critically revered Secrets & Lies star Marianne Jean-Baptiste. But you’d be wrong.

Fortunately for Mike Leigh, his plays are always reliably financed. But unfortunately for cinephiles, especially on the political left, who want to see directors dedicating themselves to complex representations of the working class, there’s no replacement for Mike Leigh.