At The Movies: Unforgettable anti-heroine anchors Hard Truths, Peg O’ My Heart a facile horror

Hard Truths (PG13)

97 minutes, opens on May 29
★★★★☆

The story: British cinema emeritus Mike Leigh, a dramatist of tragicomic everyday realism, observes the relationship between two middle-aged sisters of clashing temperaments in London’s Afro-Caribbean working-class community.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste collected two dozen best actress prizes for her first Leigh role since the 1996 Cannes Palme d’Or winner Secrets & Lies.

She is volcanic, starring as angry, lonely, paranoid germaphobic housewife Pansy, who is introduced in Hard Truths waking from a deep sleep gasping in panic and then spending the day – like all her days – berating her doctor, her dentist, sundry strangers and sales assistants.

Her plumber husband (David Webber) and 22-year-old layabout son (Tuwaine Barrett) have been harangued into mute submission. They are the saddest collateral wreckage of her vitriol that is triggered by even infant clothes. “What’s a baby got pockets for?” she sputters, face gnarled in revulsion.

She has a point. Leigh is a director legendary for his intensive workshopping, and the shockingly disagreeable yet bluntly funny Pansy is a unique creation built from his and his actress’ 14-week rehearsal.

Michele Austin is equally superb, playing younger sister Chantelle. She is the sunshine to Pansy’s spleen, a single hairdresser swaddled by the laughter and love of her salon customers and two adult daughters (Ani Nelson and Sophia Brown).

She presses Pansy to visit their mother’s grave together on her death anniversary. And it is at their Mother’s Day family lunch after that the horrible tension snaps to reveal Pansy’s profound pain and fears.

Leigh does not expect viewers to understand her inexpressible emotional issues. His humane character study asks only that you share in Chantelle’s sisterly compassion for this troubled woman.

Hot take: Jean-Baptiste brings to complex, furious life an anti-heroine as unlikable as she is unforgettable.

Peg O’ My Heart (NC16)

95 minutes, opens on May 29
★★☆☆☆

The story: Junior psychiatrist Dr Man (Terrance Lau) is assigned to evaluate a narcoleptic taxi driver (Nick Cheung) with terrifying night visions. What buried traumas will the good doctor unlock in himself?

Cheung plays the cabbie Choi, who sees vengeful “devils” pursuing him in inky monochrome, both in his sleep and while awake.

The award-winning actor of Beast Stalker (2008) and Unbeatable (2013) also co-wrote and directed the Hong Kong psychological mystery-thriller Peg O’ My Heart.

In his home city that is a shadowy twilight of the unconscious, his is not the only disturbed character. Choi’s reclusive wife (Fala Chen) has schizophrenia. She hallucinates the two of them carefree, skipping laughingly down the streets to the strains of the titular 1913 Ziegfeld Follies musical melody.

On the rare occasion she ventures out for real, she kills a dog and returns to their rat-infested tenement to disembowel and consume the carcass.

It is all terribly grim.

Man is meanwhile forced to confront the repressed memories within his own recurrent nightmares as he delves into his patient’s past, eventually tracing Choi’s psychosis to an act of financial fraud, back when Choi was an ace analyst.

This story set in the aftermath of the 2008 Lehman Brothers collapse is ambitious, but shallow in its exploration of capitalist greed, mental illness and domestic violence. “Dreams are a projection of our innermost secrets,” posits Man. No medical degree necessary, surely, for such a truism.

Rather than a manifestation of fractured psyches, the relentless stream of oneiric images, including Choi spewing houseflies, come off as mere horror tropes.

Hot take: This facile social issue drama may be best remembered for its unsettling visuals and a pointless big-name star cameo.