By Maurice Burbige | February 3, 2025

Photo Credit: Pixabay
Every story has an antagonist. An evil force threatening to end the world. A suspiciously suave gentleman plotting to steal the hero’s girl. The friend who rats you out to your parents. People crave someone to root against, but the villain isn’t always so easy to spot. Sometimes, the killer moves undetected, infiltrating every aspect of a person’s life.
And yet, one of the most destructive forces—one that tears apart lives, relationships, and families, particularly in the Black community—remains largely ignored. Mike Leigh’s character-driven film, “Hard Truths,” doesn’t revolve around a single antagonistic figure. Instead, it brings an unseen villain to the forefront, confronting depression in all its brutally shameful glory.
The film follows Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a severely depressed woman struggling to cope with the death of a loved one. Her declining mental health sends her into a downward spiral, distancing her from the rest of her community.
Rather than depicting her path towards a singular goal, director Mike Leigh centers the majority of the film on Patsy’s relationship with her husband Curtley (David Webber) and son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) who have both given up on her. After pushing away those closest to her, Patsy’s sister makes the difficult decision to help her face her depression.
Mental health awareness has increasingly become more normalized in contemporary discourse, with our generation perhaps being the most willing to recognize mental illnesses/disorders and accommodate the needs of those who have them. For the most part, this is an absolute positive. Many people, myself included, have received necessary mental health support from friends and professionals that would’ve been harder to receive in previous decades. Furthermore, as mental health awareness continues to spread, people are becoming better equipped to help recognize and address symptoms of mental health disorders in themselves and others.
However, there has also been a glamorization of mental illness, as if being depressed or having OCD is akin to ‘cottagecore’ and ‘clean girl’ aesthetics. Yes, depression absolutely can include lying in your bed all day listening to beautifully atmospheric Lana Del Rey & Billie Eilish music, but the downside of mental health conforming to the trend-cycles of all contemporary discourse our social-media-obsessed generation has, is that the less beautiful realities of depression are ignored. This may include rotting in your own filth for days because you don’t have the energy to even bring yourself to shower, or near-bullying anyone you interact with because positivity and any other related emotions feel like a foreign concept to you. Or being incapable of scheduling any plans in advance because you don’t trust yourself to wake-up two days from now, or worse, don’t believe you deserve to. All mental health matters, and HardTruths depicts the positives and negatives of the Black community’s often overlooked relationship with mental health by highlighting the extent to which mental illness can harm the person suffering with it, and the people around them.
It’s easy to hate Patsy at the beginning of this film. She continuously humiliates her family, and is rude to customer service workers.Her ever-quiet son says barely anything throughout the whole film, which gives her ample opportunity to tear Moses down for his weight, loneliness, and lack of ambition. However, as the audience, we can recognize how all of this, among other details, alludes to the genetic nature of depression. Furthermore, in the broader Black community people may spend their whole lives unaware of their own mental illnesses, especially when parents, like Patsy, avoid signs and/or use them as an excuse to embarrass their child, like their parents once did to them. It’s a terrible cycle which exemplifies the classic phrase “hurt people hurt people.”
I love how “Hard Truths” successfully showcases the impact of depression on a parent's ability to care for their family while still creating a character audiences can sympathize with. Patsy is deeply flawed. Her depression takes a heavy toll on her parenting, but the story goes beyond the shallow, 'aesthetic' portrayals of mental health often seen online. She is the sum of her experiences. She didn't choose to have depression, she didn't choose to lose a loved one, and she certainly didn't choose to raise a son in a world where his skin color makes him more vulnerable to police brutality. The weight of life crushes her, and she copes the only way she knows how– by shifting that burden onto those around her.
Patsy seems like she may be a prodigal example of someone that can’t be fixed, who you can do nothing but give up on and quietly loathe. And that’s exactly what Moses and Pansy do. Despite her barrages of insults, it’s clear she's looking for care, affirmation, and affection. This is the reason a small gesture like asking someone about their day, inviting them to an event, or doing a chore they usually do when they’re clearly not in the mood, can mean so much: it shows their presence genuinely matters to you, which can often feel impossible for people struggling with depression to believe. One of the biggest fears many women have is that after they have children they will be nothing but a mother and/or wife, constantly expected to do a task related to either of those two roles, and “Hard Truths” depicts the unfortunate reality that many men often fail to see their mothers/wives as more than just that.
However, the film doesn’t have a completely negative outlook. Though it does portray the tendency of the Black community to ignore and downplay symptoms of mental illness, it also shows how the close knit bonds in Black spaces can inadvertently help the mental health of people who may not even recognize it. Multiple scenes at a salon in the film may seem out of place, but I took them as an indicator to how the Black community, above all, is a community willing to uplift each-other with genuine love and support. Even if they involve some dunking on trash husbands, these scenes are filled with an atmosphere of pure Black (female) camaraderie, an undefinable but immediately recognizable energy that bolsters the mental health and self-assuredness of Black folk everywhere.
The writing and direction, both done solely by Mike Leigh, are amazing, but a film centering this topic was always going to be made or undone by its performances, and the actors all knocked it out of the park. Jean-Baptiste has, rightfully so, received high praise for her performance, becoming the first ever woman of color to achieve the Best Actress Trifecta of the premiere New York, Los Angeles, and national film critics groups. Her performance feels so natural. Patsy’s endless rambles are so clearly a thinly-veiled attempt to avoid silence to distract her from listening to her own mind. David Webber masterfully portrays the quiet loathing of Curtley, who is all at once disgusted, concerned, and fearful of his wife. Similar can be said for Tuwaine Barrett, who spends the majority of the film playing Moses for the impenetrable, unreachable, man he wants to be, but with so many symptoms of issues that often go unrecognized in young Black men. Just like his mother, he’s so desperate for any kindness, yet doesn’t know how to ask for it. But the performance that may have stuck with me the most is Mistel Austin as Chantele, who in a relatively short film, is able to portray different emotions, often using nothing but her face and emotive eyes to display.
If representations of Blackness, mental health struggles, and realistically layered female characters in cinema intrigue you, I recommend watching “Hard Truths.” You may learn something about recognizing depression, helping those with it, and a truth that can feel impossible to those currently facing it: there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
Rating: 8/10 Damien Nose Rubs.
“Hard Truths” will be available digitally in the US on February 11th, 2025.
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