Film reviews: Hard Truths | Saturday Night | Companion | Luther: Never Too Much

Saturday Night (15) ★★★

Companion (15) ★★★

Luther: Never Too Much (15) ★★★

Following period epics Mr Turner and Peterloo, Mike Leigh returns to contemporary London with Hard Truths, another bitter, darkly funny tale of suburban woe that nevertheless feels artistically invigorating. That’s partly down to a towering central performance from Marianne Jean-Baptiste. Re-uniting with Leigh on screen for the first time since their awards-garlanded 1996 collaboration Secrets & Lies, she plays Pansy, a woman living in a permanently enraged state whose misanthropy is so extreme she frequently wakes up screaming. Unhappily married to Curtley (David Webber), and with a grown-up son (Tuwaine Barrett) still living at home, she inflicts her ire on everyone, turning the most innocuous comments and perceived slights into excuses for full-blown tongue-lashings. Even her name seems like a cosmic joke: Pansy's presence brightens up nothing, something reflected in the way her otherwise comfortable-seeming home has become a sterile prison of her own making.

Amid the constant barrage of belligerence, though, Leigh’s characters hint at why the world poses such an affront to Pansy’s existence. Curtley’s aloofness might be as much a cause as a symptom of his wife’s obvious distress while discussions between Pansy and her cheerful younger sister Chantelle (Michelle Austin) bring to light the disproportionate burdens placed on their respective childhoods by their hyper-critical mother. But just as Leigh never felt the need to fully explain Sally Hawkins’ relentless cheerfulness in Happy-Go-Lucky, or David Thewlis’ nihilism in Naked, neither he nor Jean-Baptiste provide the sort of cathartic breakdown or breakthrough that will likely satisfy armchair analysts in the audience. In the end, some people are just unknowable or unfixable. That’s a hard truth of life — and the dramas that try to reflect it.

Currently celebrating its 50th anniversary, Saturday Night Live (SNL) long ago secured its place in the annals of pop culture history for the sheer number of comedy behemoths who got their breaks on the show. Now the chaotic origins of its first season — with its fabled cast of John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, Gilda Radnor, Garrett Morris, Jane Curtin and Andy Kaufman — gets its own myth-burnishing movie courtesy of Saturday Night, a backstage comedy-drama depicting the countdown to the first episode’s broadcast.

Here co-writer/director Jason Reitman avoids showing us too much of what went on air (the first episode was painfully unfunny), focusing instead on capturing the essence of what would eventually take shape as the show slowly found its creative feet. As such, he makes SNL creator Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) our entry point into the drama, presenting him as a stressed-out underdog trying to drag network television belatedly into the rock ’n’ roll era with a bunch of maverick, rule-breaking comedy performers nowhere near ready for prime time.

Among the film’s own up-and-coming performers, Dylan O’Brian (as the sharply mischievous Aykroyd) and Cory Michael Smith (as the egotistical Chase) get closest to their real-world counterparts, but Shiva Baby star Rachel Sennott steals the movie as Michaels’ producer/wife Rosie Shuster. Sadly, it’s hard not to view her role as a sop to Reitman’s own blind spot regarding the vast contributions Gilda Radnor and Jane Curtin made to the show. Neither Ella Hunt (as Radnor) nor Kim Matula (as Curtin) are given much to do in the film - a depressingly literal acknowledgment of the boys’ club mentality that would rule SNL until Tina Fey became its first female head writer nearly 25 years later.

It’s too bad the trailer for Companion gives away its conceptual twist; the less you know going into this slick horror thriller the more fun it is. It stars Sophie Thatcher and Jack Quaid as Iris and Josh, a young couple spending the weekend at the luxury woodland retreat of a shady Russian playboy (Rupert Friend) who’s dating Josh’s ex (Megan Suri).

We already know something’s a little off about their own relationship thanks to Iris’s opening voiceover admission of murder and her simpering deference to the not-at-all-in-her-league Josh. But when things take a turn for the bloody, writer/director Drew Hancock (making his feature debut) puts a tech spin on the idea of gaslighting that propels the film down a more intriguing sci-fi path.

Riffing on her own turn playing the younger Juliette Lewis in TV hit Yellowjackets, Thatcher has a blast exploring Iris’s subsequent awakening as a Natural Born Killers-style avenging angel.

An entertaining primer on the late soul singer Luther Vandross, Dawn Porter’s documentary Luther: Never Too Much offers a compelling portrait of an artist whose storied career took him from a job on Sesame Street to Grammy-winning solo success via groundbreaking collaborations with everyone from David Bowie and Nile Rodgers to Aretha Franklin and Diane Warwick. Alas, his own loneliness — fuelled by sensitivity about his sexuality and body image — repeatedly undercut his considerable achievements, something the film explores with admirable sensitivity.

Hard Truths, Saturday Night and Companion are in cinemas from 31 January; Luther: Never Too Much is in cinemas from 30 January.