B-

Two instruments dominate Gary Yershon’s music for Mike Leigh’s film—a plaintive oboe and a mournful cello—and together they accurately reflect the emotional mood of “Another Year.” This is one downbeat, depressing movie. It’s almost as though the British writer-director had decided he needed to balance the relatively good-natured vibe of “Happy-Go-Lucky” with a heaping helping of gloom.

Actually the couple that serves as the centerpiece of the picture—which runs through the seasons of the year from spring to winter—is in reasonably good shape. They’re Tom (Jim Broadbent), a geologist employed by the government in connection with construction projects, and Gerri (Ruth Sheen), a psychological counselor with a pronounced overbite, who seem quite happy—or as happy as you can be when your main extracurricular activities appear to be sloshing down glasses of wine and puttering about on your little government allotment, growing tomatoes and other veggies. Still, they seem content, and respond happily when their gregarious, grown son Joe (Oliver Maltman)—who apparently has the adjacent allotment—visits.

But their friends and other relatives—as well as the people they just come into contact with—are a brutally unhappy lot. The tone is set at the very start, when Gerri interviews a depressed, perhaps suicidal patient, Janet (Imelda Staunton). But it’s deepened as the couple is repeatedly visited by Gerri’s co-worker Mary (Lesley Manville), a desperately depressed, and apparently alcoholic, woman with an obvious crush on Joe, who gently but firmly makes it clear he’s not interested. In summer they’re also visited by Tom’s childhood friend Ken (Peter Wight), an overweight, chain-smoking boozer who comes on to Mary, only to be rebuffed.

Things get even more troubled when Joe brings home a new girlfriend, Katie (Karina Fernandez), a chirpy physical therapist whom Gerri and Tom embrace but Mary greets with obvious hostility, sending her into an emotional tailspin. As if that weren’t enough, the final act finds the family traveling to the funeral of Tom’s sister-in-law, where Carl (Martin Savage), the thuggish son of Ronnie (David Bradley), Tom’s taciturn, frightened brother, makes a scene. Ronnie returns with the couple to their home in London, where he meets Mary, who arrives distraught and unexpected just as Joe and Katie are scheduled to come to dinner. The final shot focuses on Mary’s face as she tries to control herself in the young couple’s company.

“Another Year” might sound like a fairly bland title, but as you watch Leigh’s film you begin to feel that it has to be spoken with an air of doomed resignation, as though it really means “Oh God, not another year.” Despite the fact that Tom, Gerri, Joe and Katie represent the positive possibilities in human relationships, the overwhelming mood the picture conveys comes from Ken, Ronnie, Carl and especially Mary—a mood of hopelessness and despair. By the close the viewer may find himself approaching the suicidal attitude that Janet exhibits at the beginning.

Certainly the film shows the strengths of Leigh’s idiosyncratic technique, which involves lengthy improvisation by the actors in the molding of a final script. The actors inhabit their characters to the full, though in the case of the unhappy ones so fiercely that—given the director’s penchant for closeups (indulged by cinematographer Dick Pope)—the impact is visually harsh. And the point he’s making—that many people lead lives of quiet desperation—is inarguable.

But of course recognizing the film’s virtues doesn’t make “Another Year” any easier to take. It’s a powerful experience, but a bleak and ultimately dispiriting one.