The day I watched Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, there was a rare red weather alert where I live in central Scotland. The night before, I had gone to the supermarket and found an end-of-days scene that gave me flashbacks to March 2020. Lone shoppers lined the aisles in preparation for a Government-mandated 24-hour indoors, with several baskets piled with more food, booze and toilet rolls than any household could conceivably need during such a short time. There was a subtle difference in the atmosphere, though: where pre-lockdown preppers largely managed to keep their panic zipped up, audible bursts of anger and frustration punctuated this January 2025 queue. I had felt my own irritation — at the people arguing, at slow packers, at the lack of last-minute tomatoes — close to the surface too.

Five years after the world first went into lockdown, powder kegs of readily available anger are everywhere, from the world’s highest political offices to my local branch of Lidl. I’ve never seen a better encapsulation of this complex, deeply contemporary emotional shitstorm than Pansy, the character played in Hard Truths by the masterful Marianne Jean-Baptiste, whose breakthrough performance came in Leigh’s 1996 film Secrets and Lies. The protagonist of Leigh’s first film set in contemporary Britain since Another Year in 2010 — and his first with an all-Black cast — Pansy is a middle-aged Londoner who spends her days picking fights with strangers, sleeping at odd hours, and monologuing about the day’s perceived slights to her meek husband and largely silent son. At first, her always-on outrage is at least partly played for laughs: we see her escalate a complaint about a shop worker to an absurd degree, and complain about dogs wearing coats as her dinner gets cold.

As the film goes deeper into Pansy’s relationship with her upbeat sister Chantal — played by fellow Secrets and Lies alum Michele Austin — Jean-Baptiste reveals the emotional hurt hiding behind her outbursts of rage. She complains of an ‘illness’, though we’re not sure whether it’s physical or mental: it seems porous, like it has seeped into every cell of her body. At the dentist, exasperated, she complains that ‘it hurts when I talk, it hurts when I eat, it hurts when I drink, it hurts when I laugh.’ She can’t be just talking about her jaw. ‘I’m so lonely’, she confesses to Chantal after a visit to their mother’s grave — with great pain but also something like relief.

This shocking admittance of vulnerability doesn’t lead to an easy breakthrough. Instead of lashing out, Pansy retreats inwards, her emotional reactions stuck on their two most extreme settings. She wants to connect but doesn’t know how — and she’s not the only one. Her gregarious sister admits she doesn’t know how to help her. Her son experiences the outside world at a remove, noise-cancelling headphones on and head down on his daily walks around London.

As in many Mike Leigh films, minor characters are key to interpreting the emotional landscape: in Chantal’s hair salon, a customer abruptly halts a full-flowing conversation to go for a cigarette, like she has momentarily forgotten how to act in a social situation. Everyone in the film has moments of turning inwards or lashing outwards that feel almost instinctual, learned and cultivated in the strange (anti)social world we’ve lived through for the past half-decade.

Throughout Leigh’s filmmaking career, the director and his actors have often portrayed characters’ isolation from their surroundings via this swing between anger and withdrawal. In 1993’s Naked, David Thewlis plays Johnny, a deeply unpleasant loner, who — like Pansy — spends his days and nights airing a running commentary of complaint. Johnny wraps his nihilism in a chip-on-shoulder brand of intellectualism: he sees himself as on a higher plane than other people for not understanding that ‘God just put us here for his own entertainment’, but he keeps putting himself in their path, verbally poking them until they react. When his constant monologue escalates to something more aggressive, or when he stops in the street to let out a scream, we see the unfurled violence that he carries around like a concealed gun. Back in the room he’s squatting in, he curls around himself, rejecting the world with his physicality.

In Secrets and Lies, most of the characters keep everything neatly bottled up, save for Brenda Blethyn’s Cynthia, who exists in a constant snotty stream of helpless, apologetic tears. Her brother Maurice, played with great empathy by Timothy Spall, has patience for his family’s struggles to work through their problems, until he doesn’t: his eventual outburst at a birthday party is born of great frustration at a lack of communication and connection. But like Pansy and Chantal, he has no clear route for moving forward past this emotional outpour.

In his films set in the present day, Leigh’s characters are stewed in the societal rot of their time. Johnny’s worldview in Naked feels quintessentially 1990s, half-irony and half-nihilism in the shadow of AIDS and the lead-up to the new century. Eddie Marsan’s furious driving instructor in 2008’s Happy-Go-Lucky is Johnny’s post-millennium counterpart, his particularly explosive male entitlement typical of the time. Maurice is the inverse of this macho terror: a man looking for gentle reconciliation without the tools to do so. He’s furious at his family, but he’s also furious at a buttoned-up British society that renders them emotionally illiterate.

The unique way that Leigh develops his films with his actors is conducive to this expression of societal ills through characterisation. His actors create their characters initially based on people they know, then flesh them out through a long process of development, rehearsal and improvisation — a method pioneered on the clock of the 1970s BBC that today makes his films unusually hard to finance. In an interview with Vanity Fair, Marianne Jean-Baptiste explained that she created Pansy based on aspects of five people from her life, ‘and then we give them pain, heartache, disappointment, success. So they become a different person.’

Mike Leigh has denied that Hard Truths is about mental health, or COVID, or anything else particular to the present day. ‘All my work is an ongoing investigation into people,’ he told iNews, ‘the kind of people you see on the street. There have always been people like Pansy.’

This is of course true. Rage and isolation aren’t unique to our time. But any character created from the essence of people living now must contain a concentration of the particular rage and isolation of now: an emotional pain that is affecting everyone — sometimes quietly, often not — in political office, on social media, on the street, or indeed in the local supermarket queue.