Hard Truths Tests the Limits of Our Compassion

How far can compassion stretch? How much should we give to people who push us away? At what point do we say, enough?

Mike Leigh’s latest film, Hard Truths, doesn’t offer easy answers. Instead, it makes us sit with the discomfort of those questions, forcing us to confront the kind of compassion that isn’t soft or sentimental—but exhausting, painful, and often unacknowledged.

At the centre of the film is Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a woman weighed down by illness, depression, and a deep, simmering resentment. But crucially, the film never specifies exactly what is wrong with her. We know she suffers—physically, emotionally, existentially—but we aren’t given a diagnosis to anchor our understanding. This absence feels deliberate. It removes the easy path to empathy. We can’t rationalise Pansy’s behaviour, can’t weigh up whether her pain “justifies” her hostility. Instead, we’re asked a far trickier question: Can we show compassion without conditions? Can we care without needing to fully understand?

This is exactly the challenge faced by her sister Chantelle (Michele Austin), the one person who refuses to give up on her. But Chantelle’s compassion isn’t the polished, performative kind we’re used to seeing on screen. It’s messy, frustrating, and sometimes thankless. She’s not endlessly patient—she sighs, she gets irritated, she feels hurt. But she keeps showing up. She absorbs Pansy’s anger not because she enjoys it, but because she knows that somewhere underneath the bitterness, her sister is drowning.

One of the most painful moments in the film takes place at their mother’s grave. Pansy doesn’t want to be there, and when she finally does speak, it’s in anger. Chantelle could walk away. Many people would. But she doesn’t. She stands in the storm of her sister’s grief, knowing that her presence—more than any words she could say—is what matters.

This is what makes Hard Truths such an unsettling watch. It resists our natural instinct to judge. In a different film, we might be invited to see Pansy as the victim, her suffering neatly explained to elicit our sympathy. Or we might see Chantelle as the martyr, the angelic figure whose selflessness teaches us a moral lesson. But Hard Truths refuses to give us these comforts. Instead, he asks us to sit with the discomfort of not knowing, not understanding, not being able to neatly categorise Pansy as deserving or undeserving of kindness.

And that’s where the film’s challenge really lies. In a time when we’re encouraged to set boundaries, to remove “toxic” people from our lives, Hard Truths makes a case for something harder: compassion that persists even when it’s not easy. It doesn’t argue that we should endlessly endure cruelty, but it does challenge the idea that kindness should only be given to those who “deserve” it. Because often, the people who seem the least deserving of compassion are the ones who need it the most.