Treat others the way you wish to be treated. In Mike Leigh’s newest venomous yet devastating drama, Pansy seems to take this to heart. Except she treats everyone cruelly, pushing them further and further until they snap back. Perhaps she has her reasons to be angry, but also maybe she wants to be yelled at. Perhaps she feels like she deserves to have people hate her, even when they try to like her. Her family loves her, but do they like her? Does she like them? Did she ever?

Marianne Jean-Baptiste reunites with Leigh for the first time since 1996’s Secrets & Lies to create one of the most verbally cruel characters you’ll ever meet. At first her snapping attitude towards her husband Curtley (David Webber, a beautiful performance, mostly communicated through painful eyes) and her 22-year old son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett, affectingly quiet), is brash and comedic enough to rival Larry David. But with each insult, it’s clear her unshakable anger digs just as deep into her as it does everyone else that has to tolerate her. It’s a burden she bares. A curse she’s been afflicted with since a somewhat recent traumatic event left her bitter to the world.

Jean-Baptiste is giving a performance for the ages, one that has to be tolerated as much as it needs to be studied. A woman who begs to be able to smile, who yearns for satisfaction, but is blind to it. “I’m just tired.” “I hurt everywhere.” “I’ve got a migraine.” Everyone offers her help, yet her insticts force her to push everyone away. Jean-Baptiste finds colossal tragedy and embodies it. Pansy is unfixable. Not even the simplest, kindest gesture from her son later in the film can cure her sadness, despite her heart clearly melting with gratitude at the realization.

And then there’s her sister Chantelle (played with enormous luminosity by Michele Austin), an absolute beam of warmth, her polar opposite in every way. She’s the one person who can challenge her attitude, who can tip the scale of the weight of her issues only just barely. Everyone else tries to tolerate Pansy, but Chantelle is the only one who understands her, and the only one Pansy allows to. Austin delivers a breathtaking contrast to Jean-Baptiste, allowing the audience to breath when Pansy’s relentless presence becomes suffocating.

What Leigh and his actors have achieved here is personifying the unifying anger of the state of the modern world into the mouth of Pansy Deacon, the conduit of all of our resentment, sadness, confusion, panic, exhaustion, and grief in a post-pandemic world. We get some answers to her issues, but no solutions. There is only the promise of more pain. Inevitable pain. But its her pain that reminds us that she’s still human, whether she’ll admit it or not. And what are the greatest Mike Leigh characters if not devastatingly human.