Producer: Georgina Lowe   Director: Mike Leigh    Screenplay: Mike Leigh   Cast: Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Michele Austin, David Webber, Tuwaine Barrett, Ani Nelson, Sophia Brown, Jonathan Livingstone, Gary Beadle, Hiral Varsani, Samantha Spiro, Ruby Bentall, Diveen Henry, Bryony Miller, Ashna Rabheru, Jo Martin, Llewella Gideon, Naana Agyei Ampadu, Donna Banya, Syrus Lowe, Elliot Edusah and Tiwa Lade     Distributor: Bleecker Street

Grade: B+

Anger is a constant in the life of Pansy Deacon (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), the perpetually furious, utterly belligerent housewife who’s the protagonist of Mike Leigh’s “Hard Truths.”  Brilliantly embodied by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, she’s a person you would never want to meet—except on screen, the polar opposite to the unfailingly optimistic, good-natured Poppy whom Sally Hawkins played in Leigh’s delightful 2008 “Happy-Go-Lucky.”

Pansy picks fights with virtually everyone she encounters, be it a driver (Gary Beadle) she tussles with over a parking spot (he has the temerity to inquire whether she’s about to leave it—a question that escalates into a vitriolic shouting match), a clerk (Alice Bailey Johnson) who unwisely offers to help her pick out a couch in a department store as well as a couple (Elliot Edusah and Tiwa Lade) she berates for being too cuddly on a floor model, a doctor (Ruby Bentall) or dentist (Hiral Varsani) she assumes to be incompetent or insufficiently solicitous, and even a couple of customers (Diveen Henry and Bryony Miller) waiting in the check-out line behind her at a store.  (The cashier, played by Ashna Rabheru, simply smiles vacantly at the brouhaha, perhaps accustomed to such verbal skirmishes.)

If outsiders are often targets of her rage, however, her family feels the brunt of it.  Her husband Curtley (David Webber), a self-employed plumber, bears up stoically under her harangues, which include complaints about his employment of Virgil (Jonathan Livingstone), a competent, reliable fellow, as his assistant rather than their son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett).  And yet she’s equally hard on Moses, a burly, gentle twenty-two year old who spends most of his day in his bedroom playing video games, except when he goes out for long, rambling walks, on which he might meet a pleasant girl (Donna Banya) but is more likely to be accosted by bullying boys.  Both husband and son have been beaten down by Pansy’s shrill, relentless badgering and her incessant barbs about the state of the world.

Her fury is also directed against her younger sister Chantelle (Michele Austin), a stylist in a hair salon who’s as congenitally upbeat as Pansy is ill-tempered.  Even when Chantelle is doing her hair, no doubt gratis, Pansy can’t resist being abrasive.  But Chantelle maintains her sunny disposition, and her home life is far from the bleakness of her sister’s.  She’s a single mother to two grown daughters, Kayla (Ani Nelson) and Aleisha (Sophia Brown), who have good positions, the former as a marketing executive and the latter as a legal intern.  Both seem eminently well-adjusted and happy, despite Kayla’s boss (Samantha Spiro) being rather a harpy (Syrus Lowe, as Kayla’s colleague, rolls his eyes at her nasty put-downs) and Aleisha’s (Naana Agyei Ampadu) being no less demanding, though in a nicer way.

What’s the cause of Pansy’s rage, which, in Jean-Baptiste’s ferocious performance (the result, like the entire film, of the intensive collaborative improvisation and rehearsal between Leigh and his cast that has been the writer-director’s creative modus operandi for decades), is at once scathingly hilarious, terrifying and profoundly sad?

On the surface it’s inexplicable: she’s living what seems a relatively comfortable middle-class life in a modest suburban house, which she keeps scrupulously clean, to the extent that it seems sterile (here, as elsewhere, Suzie Davies’ production design is impeccable, and Dick Pope’s cinematography crisply realistic): when she finds a banana peel Moses has left on a counter, she erupts, just as she does when a fox scampers into her back yard.  (Chantelle’s apartment, by contrast, is alive with plants.)  There are hints of an unhappy childhood with a mother who demanded much of her as the oldest child, and she’s constantly complaining of being unwell, taking to her bed and awakening with a horrified gasp from what would seem to be frightening, unspecified dreams.

But the film offers no simple explanation: Pansy is simply who she is, deeply depressed, always complaining about being tired and lonely, always ready to take out her seething vitriol on anyone and everyone.  When Chantelle persuades her to visit their mother’s grave on the fifth anniversary of her death, after Pansy has repeatedly begged off committing to the trip on grounds of her supposed maladies, it’s a frosty event, filled with tension.  Chantelle asks, “Why can’t you enjoy life?” to which she simply responds, “I don’t know,” adding, “It’s not fair.”  When they repair to Chantelle’s place for a family meal, she refuses to eat; and when Moses gives her a bouquet for Mother’s Day, her reaction is more of horror than acceptance, and she withdraws into her private hell, which a domestic setback will deepen.  Viewers expecting a last-act catharsis will instead be faced with imagining what might follow, reaching their own conclusions.  Leigh isn’t about to tie everything up neatly and resolve the mysteries of human behavior he and his cast have fashioned.

Jean-Baptiste is the roaring center of “Hard Truths,” and she’s so overwhelming that it might be hard to properly appreciate the sterling performances by the cast of the cast.  But they’re all exceptionally fine, especially Austin, who comforts her sister as best she can, an example of unconditional love if ever one existed.  Tanie Reddin’s precise editing and Gary Yershon’s score, modulating between melancholy tones and brief turns to possible brightness, add to the technical polish.

Leigh, returning to the smaller scale of his early films, including “Secrets & Lies” (1996), his first collaboration with Jean-Baptiste, following forays into larger-scale works like “Mr. Turner” and “Peterloo,” proves that as he enters his eighth decade he’s lost none of his touch in creating piercing portraits of characters whose complexity is both compelling and somehow baffling.  If “Hard Truths” turns out to be his final film, it is one that again reaffirms the wisdom behind his idiosyncratic mode of filmmaking. It’s an extraordinarily vivid and provocative study of a woman constantly on the edge.

Producer: Dominique Dussault   Director: Pascal Plante   Screenplay: Pascal Plante   Cast: Juliette Gariépy, Laurie Babin, Elisabeth Locas, Natalie Tannous, Pierre Chagnon, Guy Thauvette and Maxwell McCabe-Lokos   Distributor: Utopia

Grade: B+

It’s the widespread public fascination with serial killers, rather than the killers themselves, that’s the focus of Pascal Plante’s chillingly austere courtroom drama.  The accused is Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), charged not only with brutally killing three girls, but broadcasting the murders to paying customers via a “Red Room,” a site on the darkest web.  The bodies were found buried in his backyard. 

The evidence against him is laid out in coolly methodical fashion by the prosecutor (Natalie Tannous) in her opening statement, while in his rebuttal the defense counsel (Pierre Chagnon) mounts an assault on its circumstantial character.  Francine Beaulieu (Elisabeth Locas), the mother of Camille, the one victim whose murder video has not yet been found, looks on anxiously from the gallery.

Watching from coveted chairs in the Montreal courtroom are two women who become central to the narrative.  One is Clémentine (Laurie Babin), a Chevalier groupie, an excitable, scraggly sort who’s travelled to the city after deciding that’s he’s innocent, an opinion she’s eager to share even when unasked.  The other is Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), a striking, almost preternaturally poised fashion model who’s honed her hobby of playing internet poker to a fine, and lucrative, art.  She’s obsessed with the case, though it’s not obvious why and her glacial demeanor is totally at odds with Clémentine’s emotional volatility.

Nevertheless Kelly-Anne takes pity on the poor girl’s straitened circumstances—her scrambling to find a place to stay, her lack of money for meals.  She invites Clémentine to stay with her for the duration of the trial, and the two get to know one another in Kelly-Anne’s beautiful but sterile apartment, boasting a gorgeous view of the city but only minimal furnishings.  As host she introduces the girl to her companion, an AI-generated assistant of her own devising she calls Guinevere that becomes a source of amusement to them both, and watches in quiet horror as Clémentine calls in to a TV program in which a panel are discoursing on Chevalier’s obvious guilt, only to be treated with disdain.

Meanwhile Kelly-Anne’s focus on the trial becomes truly intense.  She’d already used her computer expertise to locate the Beaulieu home, as well as the footage of the two murders that was excluded from public view in court, which she shares with Clémentine, who points out that the murderer is masked and could be anyone.  She goes to court one day made up to look like Camille in her school uniform, catching Chevalier’s eye but so outraging the customers of the modeling firm that she’s fired.

And now she goes further.  She searches the dark web and discovers that an auction is planned for the footage of Camille’s murder.  She amasses as much as she can from her online poker games to earn a spot among the bidders, and then sets out to win the footage.  Whether she’ll succeed, and what she intends to do with the footage if she does, form the basis for the film’s tense final act.

Plante presents Clémentine, played by Babin with unaffected certainty, in simple strokes, but Kelly-Anne is another matter entirely.  Her motivations are kept obscure behind Gariépy’s icy, undemonstrative exterior as she delves further and further into the sinister recesses of the internet that could provide evidence to convict or exonerate Chevalier.  Is she a groupie of a different sort, a would-be crusader or simply an obsessive determined to know the truth while keeping it hidden?  Plante and Gariépy keep us guessing until the very end, and even then they offer no simple explanation for her character and actions. 

The result is both a cool, cerebral thriller that establishes a suspenseful vibe early on and maintains it to the end without resorting to cheap tricks, and an astutely observed study of a relationship that develops between two utterly different women.  Cinematographer Vincent Biron’s images possess a metallic sheen that sets off Laura Nhem’s elegant production design and Renee Sawtell’s costumes, which distinguish expertly between Kelly-Anne’s sophisticated wardrobe and Clémentine’s simple one.  Editor Jonah Malak accentuates Plante’s probingly deliberate pacing to enhance the suspense, while Dominique Plante’s eerie score adds to the unsettling mood.

This discreet, understated film is about a monster, but it unnerves you the old-fashioned way—with suggestion rather than the crude horror devices so common nowadays.