A wildly imaginative deep dive into grief and garbage, lust and loss, broken families and bodily fluids, British writer-director Luna Carmoon’s flavoursome debut feature arrives in Venice Critics’ Week on a swell of positive advance buzz. Hoard is a nostalgic coming-of-age saga that depicts working-class London life though a refreshingly lyrical lens, without the thuddingly earnest cliches that sometimes hobble Brit cinema’s venerable social-realist canon.
A low-budget labour of love, Hoard seems to be partly based on Carmoon’s own family upbringing in South London. Not that you would pick up any clues from her gloriously pretentious Venice press notes, which appear to have been written in jazz poetry form. This emphatically personal passion project is not without first-film flaws, notably its baggy two-hours-plus runtime, but it does have a strong voice and a bold vision, with promising echoes of early-career Lynne Ramsay and Andrea Arnold. Further festival bookings, awards and art-house interest all feel like solid possibilities. After Venice, Hoard will next screen at BFI London Film Festival next month.
The film’s shorter opening act takes place in the southeast London suburbs in 1984. Young Maria (screen novice Lily-Beau Leach, compelling and convincing) lives with her eccentric single mother Cynthia (Hayley Squires), their cramped home piled high with the clutter and trash that they obsessively collect together on late-night scavenging forays around the neighbourhood. This odd couple share an intensely close bond, reinforced by ritual rhymes and scatological poems, defiantly wearing their shared outsider status like armour against a cruel outside world of school bullies and hostile neighbours.
There is squalor and filth in this claustrophobic setting, and even hints of the dysfunctional family psycho-horror seen in Grey Gardens (1975) or The Cement Garden (1993). But there is love and magic and fragile beauty here too. Carmoon does not over-explain the mental health implications behind Cynthia’s obsessive-compulsive hoarding, viewing it instead through Maria’s innocent, non-judgmental eyes.
After Cynthia suffers a tragic accident, Maria is removed to a new home in the care of a new foster mother, Michelle (Samantha Spiro). Carmoon then jumps forward a decade to 1994, where teenage schoolgirl Maria (Saura Lightfoot Leon) is now happily settled with her second family. She appears to be a dreamy, self-absorbed, mostly well-adjusted adolescent. But her calm outward facade begins to crack after her best friend and cherished confidante Laraib (Deba Hekmat) is sent away by her strict parents as punishment for flirting with boys. At the same time, another of Michelle’s former temporary care children returns for a short stay, Michael, played by Stranger Things regular Joseph Quinn on impressively smouldering form.
Michael’s brooding Stanley Kowalski magnetism soon creates a charged atmosphere of sexual tension. Even though he is on the cusp of marriage and fatherhood, he and Maria develop a lusty love-hate infatuation that takes on an increasingly bizarre, ritualistic, sado-masochistic dimension. Using visual and audio echoes from the opening section, spiced with spare hallucinatory flashbacks, Carmoon underscores how Maria’s unresolved grief over her mother’s death is playing out through her similarly intense relationship with Michael. Full of stylised dialogue, deliberately artificial jump cuts and queasy scenes of shared body fluid, this final act is the film’s most stylistically ambitious section, but also the most loose and unfocussed. While these quasi-musical motifs and visual rhymes are smart structural touches, they might have been more effective with a tighter edit.
With its free-form narrative loops, uneasy tonal shifts and recurring allusions to Volker Schlöndorff’s controversial coming-of-age classic The Tin Drum (1979), Carmoon’s idiosyncratic vision requires a patient, sympathetic viewing. But Hoard is also made with unquestionable visual flair, solid performances and rich emotional depths. For all its occasional wonky excesses, this is a strikingly original debut feature from a refreshingly off-beat new cinematic talent. More of this poetic oddness would be very welcome.
Director, screenwriter: Luna Carmoon
Saura Lightfoot Leon, Joseph Quinn, Hayley Squires, Lily-Beau Leach, Samantha Spiro, Deba Hekmat
Producers: Loran Dunn, Helen Simmons, Andrew Starke
Cinematography: Nanu Segal
Editing: Rachel Durance
Production designer: Bobbie Cousins
Music: Jim Williams
Production companies: Delaval Film (UK), Erebus Pictures (UK), Anti-Worlds (UK)
World sales: Alpha Violet, Paris
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Critics’ Week)
In English
126 minutes
