Of the recent glut of exciting and distinctive British debuts, Luna Carmoon’s Hoard may not be the best or most original, but it certainly takes the crown as the grossest. Here is a film about mental health crises, inherited trauma, and overwhelming, toxic sexual impulses that you can practically smell, diving into the physicality of madness and lust in a way that is genuinely sickening. It’s an impressively confrontational first effort from Carmoon, actually abrasive in a way that most films that claim to be simply aren’t and, though it’s certainly flawed – perhaps even fatally so – it marks the arrival of a serious and fearless new talent on the UK filmmaker scene.
As has been the case with a lot of these recent debuts (see: Morfydd Clark in Saint Maud, Frankie Corio in Aftersun, and Rosy McEwen in Blue Jean), Hoard isn’t just an introduction to Carmoon, but her leading lady too, in this case Saura Lightfoot Leon. She, along with Lily-Beau Leach (giving a remarkable performance) as her younger self, plays Maria, the daughter of a loving but manic hoarder (played with great intensity by Hayley Squires) who has been in foster care for a decade or so after her mum was nearly killed by a crush of hoarded waste.
Having just finished school and with no clear future plans, Maria begins to unravel, slowly displaying signs of her mother’s hoarding compulsions – a process expedited by the arrival of Michael (Joseph Quinn), a former foster of Maria’s foster mum Michelle (Samantha Spiro), who is now in his late 20s and needs a place to stay for a few weeks. There’s an instant, animal attraction between Maria and Michael, one that expresses itself mostly in strange, sexually charged fights and escalating dips into compulsive, revolting behaviours, like eating ash with a spoon or licking a spit-cereal mix out of one another’s hands.
All this stuff is genuinely bracing and unnerving, both characters frightening in their unpredictability, and it’s when Hoard is at its most physically grounded that it and its actors are at their best. In particular, it’s a very impressive introduction to Lightfoot Leon, couched in a deeply familiar, yet also grotesquely heightened, tragic teenage awkwardness. When Carmoon takes things to a more nightmarish place, though, Hoard starts to trip itself up – the pacing suddenly becomes distractingly choppy (at over two hours, Hoard definitely runs too long), the more poetic dialogue doesn’t sound right and the actors struggle to reach the ridiculous fever pitch the film suddenly demands of them. Quinn, especially, seems in over his head.
Still, to even attempt the leap is admirable, especially when Carmoon has already proven herself so willing to test her audience – mostly when films get labelled ‘transgressive’ at their festival premieres I end up finding the label overblown, but that was absolutely not the case here. Compared to the best of its recent stablemates Hoard doesn’t have the thrill of Saint Maud, the sheer emotional heft of Aftersun, or the lightning energy of Rye Lane, but, even if only for the fact that you’ll likely dry-heave at least once watching it, it still leaves the sort of indelible mark that debut filmmakers can mostly only wish for.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 