Look hard — and, in all likelihood, in vain — for a fiercer performance in the past year than Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s in Mike Leigh’s “Hard Truths.” She plays Pansy, a Londoner who lives with husband Curtley (David Webber) and adult son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) in a house so impeccably tidy and bland it could be mistaken for a hotel. Something else lives in that house, too: rage, which perpetually simmers within Pansy, emerges and bounces off those two sullen, quiet men and those bare white walls. Everything, no matter how small, makes Pansy furiously angry: Moses’ habit of taking walks, the sight of a dog wearing a coat or a baby wearing a jacket with pockets (“What’s a baby got pockets for?”), an unexpected fox in the garden, having to wait, other people getting impatient in line (“It’s a queue! You’re supposed to wait!”), dirty dishes, a too-young doctor, and the simple act of waking up in the morning, which she accompanies with a scream.

A mesmerizing flip side of Leigh’s “Another Year,” which was a portrait of a delightfully happy marriage, “Hard Truths” immerses us in the psyche of a terribly unhappy person, and the story of an extended family that struggles to connect. (That Pansy may be suffering from a mental illness is mostly left undiscussed, though she does frequently reference physical ailments. We’re mostly left thinking that this is someone who’s simply unable to be happy.) But Leigh also offers us a contrast: Pansy’s much-sunnier sister Chantelle (the wonderful Michele Austin), who lives with her two ever-laughing daughters (Ani Nelson, Sophia Brown) in a cozy apartment that seems to exude warmth. Chantelle, a hairdresser who easily bonds with her clients, has trouble finding common ground with her sister, staring at her with equal parts concern and frustration. “I love you,” she tells Pansy, in a moving scene as the sisters visit their mother’s grave. “I don’t understand you, but I love you.”

All of the performances are vivid (Webber’s ability to convey heartbreak in a silent gaze is uncanny), but Jean-Baptiste, reuniting with Leigh for the first time since 1996’s “Secrets & Lies,” holds on to this movie the way Pansy holds on to a grudge. Her face, in close-up, is all clenched jaw and pulled-down mouth; her posture and affect seem to bring darkness to an otherwise bright room, changing the temperature of the air. Her constant litany of irritation is often funny (listen for the hilarious spin she puts on the word “tripe”), but Jean-Baptiste lets us see in this woman’s eyes something lost, something that has crushed her hopes. As is typical of Leigh, the film offers no pat answers, just a bit of hope for Moses and a long, beautifully ambiguous final close-up of Pansy — an entire novel, in one remarkable face.

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‘HARD TRUTHS’

3.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for language)

Running time: 1:37

How to watch: Now in theaters

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