Director Mike Leigh with Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Michele Austin

A film about misery. Pansy is middle-aged: tired, hostile, hectoring, afraid of the outside world and the germs it harbours. She is miserable and makes the lives of others a misery. You assume there is something undiagnosed – depression, mental illness – but there’s no way Pansy will seek help. Her plumber husband is taciturn: perhaps he has never been a nice man (there are hints), but now he is just morose and sad. Their adult son is obese and spends much of his day in his room with his model planes and childish books about them when he doesn’t go for aimless walks with headphones on. He is also sad. Perhaps with some neuro-divergence (there is no labelling in the film). They are all stuck and none of them knows how to unstick themselves.

It should be gruelling – and it often is – but Pansy’s articulate skewering as she berates everyone around her somehow leavens the depression – for the audience at least. And her sister, Chantelle, is her welcome opposite: upbeat, cheerful, comforting and lively, happy with her two daughters and her hairdressing salon. She is the only one who can get through to Pansy, but it doesn’t make anything better. There is something about their dead mother – their differing experiences of her – but no story arc, no redemption, no defining action that makes a difference: as in real life, the misery goes on.

And it’s brilliant. The acting is really special: Jean-Baptiste makes Pansy totally believable. All the main characters are Afro-Caribbean Londoners. There is nothing explicit about ethnicity – except perhaps that Chantelle lives in a colourful, crowded flat with a balcony crammed with plants and works within a black bubble, and Pansy lives in a quiet interwar suburb which is photographed in the opening shots as if bleached into whitewash. In such ways and through its story, the film suggested how environment, experience and heredity shape a person and her behaviour.