‘Hard Truths’ is a masterclass in acting, with Marianne Jean-Baptiste reuniting with Mike Leigh since her Oscar-nominated performance in ‘Secrets and Lies’. There, her character was a young, serene, intelligent professional whose birth mother was her polar opposite. In ‘Hard Truths’, Jean-Baptiste is an embittered, quasi-reclusive figure, Pansy, who struggles to engage with the world, and when she does so it is with anger and rancour, shouting at other customers in the supermarket checkout or even at shop assistants who ask if they can be of help to her while she is looking for a new sofa.

Believing the world is against her, Pansy alienates herself from her family and the world, and we sense that there is deep trauma which may relate to the complicated relationship she had with her mother, whose dead body she found a few years earlier, and it is the patient and graceful presence of her sister Chantelle (Michele Austin) who looks for the last remaining shreds of humanity in a woman who is pathologically unable to cope. This works, in typical Leigh fashion, in the mundane world – here on a London residential estate. As with ‘Secrets and Lies’ which draws on the same tropes, ‘Hard Truths’ is shot in daylight, with the suggestion that with the focus of the clear light of day there is nowhere that Pansy can hide.

The spotlight is on her throughout, and even when she retreats to her bed during the daytime to escape a world that she feels is against her, she receives no respite, screaming at her placid husband Curtley (David Webber) – who looks like a rabbit in the headlights throughout – for disturbing her and rendering her unable to achieve the impossible dream of rest. Pansy is an agent of chaos, but we sense that she can only function when she is shouting at the world, as in so doing she is deflecting attention away from her own insecurities and absence of a clear centre.

She is a reactive figure – her modus operandi is one of argument and recrimination – but she is afraid to confront the root cause of her suffering. It is through a pared-down, minimalist TV-type drama as this that Leigh is on the very best form, with an intimate character study of someone we instantly recognize – as with Sally Hawkins’ effervescent Poppy in ‘Happy-Go-Lucky’, or indeed Jean-Baptiste’s mother in ‘Secrets and Lies’, played with distinction by Brenda Blethyn, Pansy is someone who has the feel of a real person in all their dysfunction and rawness, the sort of person we have all sat next to on a bus or in a GP surgery and tried to avoid as they exude bitterness and are easily provoked.

What Leigh does so painstakingly is deconstruct Pansy, beginning by showing her as someone who we want to laugh at for her over the top, mannered barbs, but the more we go on we realize that we are dealing with someone wounded, whose mental health is in freefall, and Leigh pokes and prods away, though, characteristically, without catharsis. There is no pat healing or redemptive coda, but that is not to say the film isn’t optimistic and graceful in the way that it shows that humanity and kindness can be found in the most unexpected places, and it is the warmth – often quite undeserved and unreciprocated – that is extended to Pansy that places ‘Hard Truths’ – the title speaks volumes – in the upper echelons of Leigh’s magnificent oeuvre.