Film

Visual language, sound, light and rhythm are to the fore in the best movies of the year

- Catherine Shoard, Rebecca Liu, Adrian Horton, Peter Bradshaw, Benjamin Lee

5 Hard Truths

Pockets on babygrows and feet on new sofas. Parking and flowers and disregard of coasters. Foxes and packaging and dating and grins, these are a few of Pansy's least favourite things. What the heroine of Mike Leigh's steamingly brilliant drama does like is less clear. She spends her days under the bedcovers or scrubbing her already-sterile semi or berating anyone who wanders into her crosshairs. But none of those bring her actual pleasure.

Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is on the precipice, yelling at the waves. Stricken by some horrific depression or trauma-triggered rage, she bubbles over with a caustic confidence that's 90% jaundice, 10% justified.

She is not, I think, an especially accurate portrayal of depression. And her being held up as such feels unhelpful to the cause of Leigh's most searing and uncompromising film in years: a true psychological thriller, or perhaps a psycho-horror.

Hard Truths is one of the most gripping films I've seen in ages, because you have no idea what Pansy will do next, or whether those around her - her joyful sister, taciturn husband, cowering son - will snap. You watch it clutching the seat, holding your breath, as even the moments of apparent catharsis are made a mockery of, healing undone before it's ever begun.

Leigh hadn't shot a film set in the present day since 2010's Another Year-shot round the corner from this, a milder cousin. He hadn't made one with Jean-Baptiste for 28 years, since Secrets and Lies, her breakthrough, which was funny and compassionate as well as brutal. Her Pansy is a performance of acid immensity.