I too first disliked it, and then.... Deserves a 2nd viewing

I'm not the biggest Mike Leigh fan. I still think Secrets and Lies is over-emoted drivel. The big emotional "reveal" scene at the end left me shaking my head.

Initially, I found H-G-L plotless and somewhat annoying. How in the world can anyone be so "up"? Then I watched it again.

Poppy is not exactly happy-go-lucky. That would indicate a kind of feckless innocence, and she is not an innocent. Leigh's title intentionally is a red herring. To say she is h-g-l would be, rather, Scott's point of view: Poppy is the kind of person he abhors and desires at the same time, which only makes him more angry and dismissive. He would simply dismiss her as a type, h-g-l, and congratulate on his "superior" judgement. Unfortunately for him, he is stuck with her for while.

The key to understanding Poppy, then, is not with the appellation of "happy go lucky." It is that she has made a conscious decision to be OPEN. In other words, she forgoes the kind of common defenses everyone possesses in order to keep the world at bay. This is not to suggest that she is naive; she clearly has boundaries and has a very solid sense of herself.

The initial few minutes we spend with her we see her out in the world, on her bike. She goes into the bookstore and encounters the surly clerk, who presages Scott's appearance. She loses her bike but, because she has, at some earlier point in her life, made a decision to not "curse her luck", she sadly accepts the loss and moves on. And really, it is a saner thing to do, isn't it, than standing there and railing against someone you can't see. She'll be wiser next time and maybe buy a better lock.

When she ventures into the ramshackle place where the homeless man is, she seeks to understand his experience by simply being there and offering human contact.

She doesn't like Scott exactly, but she won't give up on him either. "Tough to be you," she teases him at one point. Even when [SPOILER] Scott accosts her near the end, she doesn't give up; she offers him empathy but also FIRMLY rejects his overture and ends the relationship.

At her sister's place, her sister accuses her of being glib, in a way, and she refuses that, kindly. "I love my life," she says. "Sure, there are some times when things don't go well, but that's part of it, isn't it." She goes on to list her assets, which are very simple; but we see how much she really has.

Give the film another look, and slow down, if you didn't like it the first time.
Eddie Marsan's Scott really cements Sally Hawkins' Poppy.