In Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, the laughter dies out the longer you watch

Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths is about a middle-aged mother with a taciturn husband and a layabout son.

Pansy ( Marianne Jean-Baptiste ) wakes each morning with a start, as if the mere act of reentering the conscious world is an unwelcome shock.

The more we watch, the more we start to feel that she's stuck in that mode.

Hard Truths returns Leigh to the intimacy of the domestic sphere.

It's a deceptively simple movie, shot with unobtrusive sensitivity by Leigh’s longtime collaborator Dick Pope , who died last year .

But volumes play out on Jean-Baptiste's face as her furor ebbs and the terrible fear and loneliness surge to the front.