Leave it to Mike Leigh to deliver what may well be the most charming, thoughtful and quietly moving film of the year.

There’s been a bit of ambiguity about what Tender Loving Care means for the 83 year-old British filmmaker, who suggested early on that this would be his final film. He has since said it’s almost certainly his last, citing his myositis, but has stopped short of formally announcing his retirement. Regardless, the movie itself certainly seems to imply as much, acting as a fairly direct curtain call for the veteran master’s incredible career spanning over sixty years of theatre, television and film. 

Like many of Leigh’s movies, Tender Loving Care follows the lives of a few ordinary people trudging on spiritedly against the small hardships, personal tragedies and woes of life. Leigh alumnus Kate O’Flynn (Happy Go Lucky, Mr. Turner, Peterloo) plays Amy, a chipper middle-aged government child protection worker who, after finally deciding to leave her toxic long-term relationship, moves back in with best friend and fellow social services officer Rosie (Alice Bailey Johnson). Together, they visit Amy’s aging parents Birdie (Marion Bailey) and Geoff (Paul Jesson), who are still deeply in love after decades together, but are bracing for the reality of Geoff’s declining health.

Leigh’s knack for capturing the spirit and stoicism of the British working classes has never been so fervent as it is here, and many in the London Film Festival audience last night will undoubtedly have seen remnants of their own friends and family members in its small ensemble. Leigh delightfully emphasises the self-deprecating, resilient, keep-calm-and-carry-on nature of the Brit who refuses to drown in their misfortune but instead uses it as an excuse to huddle together. “Never mind, what are you going to wear tonight?” Amy asks Rosie, after the latter confesses to a particularly traumatising day at work. It’s a mentality that has been part of the fabric of British culture for decades, and Leigh attends as much to the sunny exchanges between Amy, Rosie, Birdie and Geoff as he does to the wounds they’re carrying underneath it all.

A gentle hangout movie—at least on the surface—it’s a joy to spend time with our protagonists, so open-hearted and attentive to one another that you don’t quite want to leave their side either, even after the credits roll. You’ll delight in watching them ward off the blues by singing, dancing, drinking, and laughing (and laughing and laughing) together.

But this isn’t Leigh under any illusions. The harsh realities of contemporary Britain are on display here, handled as sensitively as you’d expect from the country’s foremost voice of humanism. By day, Amy and Rosie soldier on through their jobs as social workers, working with children in foster care, vulnerable—and often aggressive—older adults, and exhausted co-workers. Like all of us, these characters are damaged—worn out, beaten and bruised—but decide nonetheless to get out of bed and face the world one day at a time. “We’re going to be alright, aren’t we?”, a smiling Amy says to her ailing father, who is experiencing signs of dementia. The beauty of the question is in the tragedy that, actually, it may well not be, but that there’s comfort to be found in saying it anyway.

Geoff, in the meantime, describes hearing the flapping of swans as he descends slowly into delirium, all the more symbolic of an image considering Leigh’s rumoured retirement. It’s fitting then that Tender Loving Care should contain all the humanity of the filmmaker’s very best work. If it is his last, he’s capping off his symphony with the perfect swan song: an ode to getting the hell on with it, not through gritted teeth but a warm, aching smile.