After two period pictures, the venerable English director Mike Leigh returns to contemporary London with his acute new film “Hard Truths.” In the post-Covid present day, its story examines how pain, depression, anger, and isolation affect a middle-aged British Afro-Caribbean woman and her family. A bit of a comedy but more of a drama, the movie is filled with uncomfortable moments and a wholly compelling, even riveting, exploration of mental and social deterioration.

Our protagonist is housewife Pansy Deacon (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), who lives in a clinically ordered, corner rowhouse with her husband Curtley and son Moses. Curtley works as a general home repairman while the 22-year-old Moses is a loafer. Pansy suffers from migraines, muscle aches, stomach issues, and more, though these ailments don’t prevent her from loudly berating Curtley and Moses, or getting into arguments with strangers every time she ventures outside. She’s also a germaphobe and easily startled, surveilling the neighborhood through her windows as if expecting trouble. The film never pinpoints her mental condition exactly, but it’s not hard to see depression, anxiety, and OCD in Pansy.

From the start, notes of humor appear as Mr. Leigh establishes the Deacon homelife, particularly during a dinner scene in which Pansy rants about streetside charity workers and dogs in coats. The main refrains, though, are distress at her hyper-critical nature and sympathy for Curtley and Moses. It’s clear she’s mad at the world while also being deeply unhappy with her husband and son. Over the course of the film, some of her gripes about the two of them and her grievances over modern society ring true, yet the way they’re delivered, with such piss and vinegar and bile, demonstrates Pansy’s failing interpersonal awareness and mental health.

Mr. Leigh contrasts Pansy’s family and twisted approximation of a social life with her sister Chantelle’s. With two upbeat, professional daughters, Kayla and Aleisha, and loyal customers at a hair salon, Chantelle seems fulfilled in a way that Pansy does not. The astute director also gives us glimpses of the daughters’ respective careers, with Kayla’s job at a skincare company revealing the low-grade racism, co-worker condescension, and lack of innovative thinking often found in the corporate world.

With his game cast, Mr. Leigh’s improvisational approach to dialogue and narrative yields a few fun moments throughout, such as when Chantelle’s daughters encourage their mother to show off some dance moves; but it’s Pansy’s tirades out in public that provide the most bemused amusement. From furniture store to supermarket, Pansy cannot help verbally accosting those she encounters. Her reproaches are like a compulsion, with attendant guilt present afterward. These “scenes” reach their apogee during back-to-back appointments with a doctor and a dentist. The invective Pansy spews alienates the very people who may be able to help her with her physical problems, and possibly even her increasing psychosis. 

“Hard Truths” furnishes Ms. Jean-Baptiste with a plum film role, the kind that fulfills the promise she showed in “Secrets & Lies,” Mr. Leigh’s 1996 classic for which she was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. Her performance astounds as an unremitting personification of a woman who is, as mentioned in the movie, “unable to enjoy life.” Exacting in its emotional tumult as it is in displaying Pansy’s tense and whiplash physicality, the portrayal walks a fine line between the comic and the dramatic — so much so that at times one feels uneasy chuckling at what is obviously a rupture in the character’s social skills and coping mechanisms.

As the gentler Chantelle, Michele Austin also deserves high praise, with the actress especially effective when the two sisters visit their mother’s grave on Mother’s Day. This cemetery scene proves tearful and touching, yet it is the next sequence, in Chantelle’s apartment, that devastates the most. As the Deacon men sit at the dinner table while Chantelle’s chirpy daughters dole out food, Pansy slumps nearby, a silent tornado pulling all the energy toward her vortex of depression and resentment. A little later on, the character loosens up enough to where Ms. Jean-Baptiste unleashes a laugh-cry not soon forgotten.

In the film’s final passage, Mr. Leigh, ever the generous humanist, focuses a bit more on patient Curtley, and actor David Webber is quietly captivating in his exasperation and need. Their marriage is at an impasse, though the director evades finality. What he does offer viewers is a pinch of optimism amongst the bitter tea of doubt and despair, in line with his other keenly observed portraits of ordinary lives and cantankerous individuals, such as 1988’s “High Hopes” and 1993’s “Naked.” In a career filled with fantastic films, the 81-year-old director has just made one of his best.