Hard truths is a horror movie.

Recently I asked a group of cinema lovers a question: What is the movie you worshiped but never wanted to see again?

The answers and reasoning behind them were nothing surprising. Requiem for a dream, Come and look, Midsommar: powerful stories whose exploration of the extremes of cruelty and suffering human leave you tense, twisting, tense and exhausted. And, most importantly, without any special desire to return.

With Hard truthsWe may have another battery title. It is a surprising addition given the issue: no war crimes are found, corpses dragged by flies or bodies of sewn bears in the new effort of the writer and director Mike Leigh. On the other hand, it is an impressionist portrait of dispersed lives, a tragicomedy carried out from the perspective of several members of a black family that slowly rots in London.

There are Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), the adult son who stays at home and whose life hides rarely opens to show flashes of repressed passion (a concern about airplanes, pilots and everything that flies) and repressed anger (a finger half pointing to a closed door). door).

There is the father, Curtley (David Webber), a professional of sad eyes that spend more time talking to his substitute son than talking to his real offspring. Is the sociable but afflicted aunt; the cheerful cousin blocked at work; and our central character, the mother, Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste).

See | Hard truth trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQHLF9kvtge

Pansy is locked in a fortress of bitterness that cannot avoid reinforcing. She is a serial complaint with frown, the type of cruel and reliable client that encourages retailers senior to touch the new employees on the shoulder and tell them: “Do not worry, I stay with this.”

Difficult character study.

Pansy complains that they never invite her to events and complain when they ask her to go. She rubs and cleanses furiously every centimeter of her house and her body, then sleeps during the day due to the exhaustion caused by a myriad of non -specific health problems.

She shouts with wild terror when they wake up, gets stranded and looks like an animal cornered, although it is not clear immediately why she would feel cornered in her aggressive Beige suburban house. It is not until an animal equally cornered in its rear patio (a terrified fox that seeks an exit to the trap in which it voluntarily fell) that the presumption of the film begins to crystallize. In both cases, they are moving away from Pansy’s husband.

As study of characters, Hard truths It is painfully good. It could be the most precise representation of the borderline personality disorder ever presented on the screen, and could become so known for representing that condition as It is not a country for old It is to represent psychopathy. In fact, Hard truths Reflect so incessant and incisive about the type of person whose irrational fear of abandonment leads to emotional explosions that could be useful as shorthand. Instead of long pamphlets or awkward conversations, worried relatives could ask: “Just out of curiosity, have you seen Hard truths? “

If it sounds scarce in terms of history, it is because it is. Apart from the fact that Pansy and his sister plan and replace a visit to their mother’s tomb, Hard truths It is in trouble for a plot. On the other hand, it is based on the power of the performance of Jean-Baptiste and the authenticity of the environments that she and the cast that surrounds the surroundings represent.

The first, as a woman trapped in a domestic nightmare she created, is relentlessly convincing. Jean-Baptiste does the tireless work of giving life to Pansy; Not only as a Cascarrabias, but as a person so trapped by his patterns that he cannot depart from them, even while observing how they destroy it.

It is almost exclusively through the impeccable control of Jean-Baptiste of the smallest aspects of his expressions that we see that he is terrified and confused by his impulses. Pansy will hurt his family with a shear vitriol and then he will be so silent and scared that one will wonder if he has just returned from an extracorporacious experience.

Webber is also a teacher in this regard, not from Casey Affleck in Mercanter by the sea Has an actor made drinking a beer so heartbreaking? But it is Leight’s approach in Pansy that keeps all other sorrows together.

It is thorough impartial in that management. Leigh does everything possible to not leave Pansy free or accuse her. Something like the truthful but awkwardly direct. CLAIBORNE DOLORES He based his thematic revelation on choosing which of the three persecuted women had correctly faced their luck on life. In it, the informal Vera Donovan offers the moral: “Sometimes, being a bitch is the only thing that a woman has to cling.”

That is exactly what Pansy clings to. But Hard truths He does not say whether or not he is right. The film only shows why he uses that attitude to endure a suffocating maternal role that only accepted out of fear, and how (figuratively) is killing those around her and (literally) killing her.

Hard truths, right?

Universal truths

The other background represented Pansy (without Rodeos, as a black person) is shared by almost all cast members, which may seem strange given the background of Leigh. But like his other films, Leigh (which is white) built the dialogue and details of the film from workshops led by actors. Here, cultural legitimacy meets the additional purpose of diverting the demands of appropriation. As WavesThe film about black excellence Directed by the white writer and director Trey Edward Shults, Hard truthsThe implicit defense is that their black actors had a direct participation in the formulation of the details.

As Great Britain’s Times told Leigh in A recent interviewThere have been complaints: is it racist that Leigh tells a story that is not yours? And their actors should not receive writing credits if they are the ones who devised much of that world?

In response to the first, Leigh said the accusation itself was offensive and racist. His argument seems to go against the Ana Karénina Principle: instead of all happy families are the same, for Leigh, all unhappy families share a universally recognizable nucleus.

And Leigh has discovered something true about humanity, instead of just one part of it. Its vertiginous collage of Desperate life-It’s, well, desperate life could have been cut and stuck between Todd Solondz scenes. Happiness (Simply place some teeth sucks on top).

Because Hard truths He believes that despite all our beautiful characteristics, we all know a Pansy. And under the skin, his most bitter fears are the same. This type of mentality of “I don’t see the color” would be exhausting if Hard truths We were not right in a fact: we are all desperate in the same way.

As for the argument of the credits, it is partly a false track. A large part of the power of this film is in the dialogue derived from the actor, and those actors should have recognition for it. But writing the general history separated from dialogue and specific scenes was an integral part of Hollywood to The brave He won the Oscar for the best story, already abolished, in 1956.

And the concept shines with the same intensity, despite the fact that the “comedy” part of tragicomedy is almost impossible to detect here. On the other hand, the chilling explanation of the film about emotional autoimmocation basically equals a horror movie, or something closer to medicine. Once again, “hard truth” (do you understand?) It is that self -preservation can have a huge cost.

And in the immortal words of those Buckley ads, It has a horrible flavor … and it works.