The return of social realism

By Aisling Towl

The release of a hotly anticipated reunion between Mike Leigh and Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Hard Truths (2024), comes at an exciting time for British cinema. Both director and actor received Oscar nominations for their last joint venture, Secrets and Lies (1996), in which Jean-Baptiste played an adopted Black-British woman seeking and finding her chaotically endearing birth mother. Yet social realism, which critic Richard Armstrong calls the “most British of all genres” has been less fashionable in recent decades. Despite contributions from a variety of filmmakers, it’s only very recently that the transformative potential of the genre is being re-realised by a promising new wave.   

‘Realism’ might be a contradiction in terms when it comes to theatre or cinema. It’s one of the most slippery words in the critical lexicon, acting as a carte blanche term for work which its proponents regard as truthful. ‘Social realism’ is perhaps easier to pin down, at least in cinema — characterised by a low budget, sweat-instead-of-gloss aesthetic; favouring character actors over cosmetic beauty; narratives grounded in contemporary events that centre ordinary, working-class people, and, usually, an anti-establishment politic. This was certainly true of the British New Wave of the 50s and 60s, which arguably originated the genre — at least in this country — before dying down in the wake of government cuts to state-subsidised filmmaking.   

With the advent of Channel 4, the 1980s saw a resurgence in social realist cinema, its practitioners clapping back at the cold individualism of the Thatcher years. Leigh’s early work was singular within this movement for its commitment to entertainment as well as commentary. His larger-than-life characters, odd couples, and dysfunctional families expressed the neuroses and frustrations of a body politic without ever slipping into didacticism or moralising — they were too busy making us laugh. Where his Angry Young Male predecessors tended to either ignore or victimise and blame women for the blighting of British manhood, Leigh’s female protagonists were complex and narratively agentic.   

He’s spent the last decade making historical dramas: Peterloo (2018), about the nineteenth century massacre, and Mr Turner (2014), about the eponymous artist. Meanwhile, Ken Loach’s austerity dramas were shown in parliament in the late 2010s: Andrea Arnold and Lynne Ramsay peppered our screens with vivid, intimate portraits of defiant youth — both women moving onto bigger things in America. Shane Meadows and Danny Boyle enjoyed more widespread acclaim in Britain, both more reminiscent of the 60s portrayals of male anger and disenfranchisement. Yet none carried quite the same cultural export value as the plummy inhabitants of Richard Curtis-land, or the chiselled lords and ladies wandering about the country homes of the period-drama renaissance who came to dominate our screens. Britishness-as-tweeness came to define our cinematic sensibility, the seemingly endless exploits of Paddington Bear its most nostalgia-sick, Rule-Britannia-whistling product.   

Where did all the realists go? Leigh has spoken candidly about his frustration at how much easier it was to attract studio funding for big historical dramas than his usual work: “I’d love to have the freedom to make a big-scale contemporary film where I don’t declare what it is so I can explore society. Nobody will cough up.” Do British studios think we’re lost our appetites for cinema that offers something other than shiny escapism? Do film festival programmers? Though Leigh won both the Palme d’Or and Golden Lion awards in 1996, his 2024 entry was rejected by both Cannes and Venice festivals — eventually premiering in Toronto, followed by San Sebastian and New York.   

Despite all this, Leigh revisits his roots with Hard Truths, and he is in good company alongside a fresh, new wave of British social realists.  Molly Manning-Walker’s How to Have Sex (2023) chronicles the first adults-free holiday of three sixteen-year-old girls, partying as they await GCSE results in a Malia party resort. A seasoned cinematographer, Manning-Walker’s shots of the clubland strip buzzing with neon life at night and eerie at dawn are arresting and sometimes dream-like. A strong ensemble cast of characters who are instantly recognisable to those who attended UK state school surround an incredible lead performance from Mia Mckenna-Bruce, whose tiny changes of expression and body language tell the story in vivid, heart-breaking close ups. How to Have Sex stunned audiences with narrative realism, infused with a stylistic boldness distilling both the horror and mundanity of sexual violence.   

Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun (2022) and Charlotte Regan’s Scrapper (2023) also both draw on the tradition in their bittersweet explorations of father-daughter relationships. The former follows father Calum on holiday at a Turkish all-inclusive with his pre-teen daughter Sophie, his calm façade concealing a deep loneliness and depression. Alongside 35mm, there is real DV cam footage shot by the actors, painting these characters in grainy detail. Watching this, we feel as if we could be on the holiday with them, let in as we are to how painful and precious these characters’ time together is. Scrapper’s father-daughter duo is livelier, with all the technicolour irreverence of Leigh’s Life is Sweet (1990) — and all its darker realism too. Jason and Georgie steal bikes together and eat spicy pasta, the world they build together acting as a colourful, if fraught, cocoon from the greyer, more serious reality of life outside.   

Luna Carmoon’s Hoard (2023) is a more abstract contribution to the genre — a dreamier social sur-realism grounded in expertly rendered characters and sensory vividness. Carmoon’s haunting meditation on hysteria and loneliness begins in the flat of Maria and Cynthia, filled to the brim with dubious trinkets scavenged from bins and pavements. These characters, and the ones we meet in the latter half of the film, possess strange, borderline degenerate qualities which play out in heart-breaking dysfunction, ripping through each other’s lives like tornadoes. Maria’s later psychodrama draws on her childhood memories slowly and then all at once — a feral kitchen sink reverie unfolds.   

Across the pond, it looked for a moment as if Sean Baker would lead a stateside movement in social realism. Baker sights the British New Wave as his key influence, as well as Leigh and Loach by name as his cinematic ‘heroes’: “they haven’t gone too commercial, but they have been commercially successful which is wonderful. They’re making a difference with their films. I would love to be able to look back at my filmography and be proud of it, that I never did anything just for the money”. His 2017 movie Florida Project was promising in its exploration of the invisible homeless communities still stuck living in Disney-themed hotels for over a decade after hurricane Katrina. Despite accusations of ‘poverty porn’ (unlike the subjects of his movies, Baker was educated at one of the most expensive private high schools in America), his portrayal of this community felt, for the most part, nuanced enough to strike a chord.   

His latest venture, the Palme d’Or and Best Picture winning Anora, follows working girl Ani as she’s swept up in a whirlwind romance with a client. At best when it leans into its slapstick comedy, the film’s downfall is its lack of interest in its title character’s psychology. Ani kicks and screams her way through prolonged brutalisation and humiliation at the hands of men, but she is given no tenable motivation or backstory of her own. This, paired with the full access we get to her body, renders Ani yet another female character to be gazed on rather than understood. Cynically, Baker’s self-professed “interest in marginalised communities”, reads as less to do with any social mission for sex workers as people, than their profitability — at $30million, Anora was the highest-grossing limited-release movie of 2024.   

Pansy, the protagonist of Hard Truths, also does a lot of screaming. We meet her as she wakes from a nightmare in her immaculate, impersonal home, follow her on fraught excursions out into the world where she rages at anyone who crosses her path, and then retreats anxiously back to her car or bedroom. A classic Leighian family drama, Hard Truths sits on the bleaker end of his filmography — you might be forgiven for expecting something lighter if it weren’t for the title. Marianne represents the psychological endgame of a society plagued by depression and anger; the hard truth that in our real world, with all its real cause for sadness and outrage and so few outlets, it’s instead usually those closest to us that feel the grim force of our quotidian frustrations. The film strategically withholds any catharsis from its audience, instead providing some release and levity in the form of Pansy’s far more cheerful and well-adapted sister, Chantelle, and her daughters.   

True to form, there is no final reckoning for Pansy or her family; just a few moments of happiness and calm amidst the pain and torment. The same can be said for the films of Leigh’s new wave of contemporaries in Manning-Walker, Wells, Regan and Carmoon — no big Hollywood climaxes, no neat tying up of ends, but moments of hope and light in amongst the heavy stuff. When done well, the genre has a unique ability to show us what we might cling to in darker times: as Leigh says of his movies, “they’re films about stuff, life”. As the world around us grows ever more politically nightmarish, perhaps this renaissance of social realism has revolutionary potential, offering, rather than escapism, a route through the world outside our cinemas.

AISLING TOWL is a writer from South London. She is the current Shaffer playwright in residence at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Art by Cordelia Wilson