Grief and trauma can take many forms, and in 26-year-old British writer-director Luna Carmoon’s debut film, Hoard, we meet a young woman who finds catharsis from the effects of a troubled childhood in her bizarre interactions with kindred spirits. That’s not to say that young Maria’s childhood was unhappy. Throughout the first 30 minutes of the film, we witness her playful and loving relationship as a young girl (Lily-Beau Leach) in the mid-‘80s with her mother, Cynthia (Hayley Squires), a woman who, despite her OCD-fueled hoarding, clearly adores Maria. Mother and daughter play dress-up together, act out their own personal fairy tales and treasure the trash for which they dumpster dive and keep piled in heaps within their increasingly messy London home.
Young Maria does have moments where she is aware of the negative effects of her mother’s unconventional home life. She feels singled out and embarrassed at school for things like not being able to find her P.E. uniform at home or getting kicked out of music class for being too tired to sing due to late-night trash-collecting outings. One night, she even experiences the trauma of encountering a flasher on the street when she’s sent on an after-dark errand by her mum. Ultimately, their own private trash kingdom literally comes tumbling down when Cynthia is crushed under a mountain of toppled garbage.
This lands Maria in foster care, and the film flashes forward a decade to the mid-‘90s. Now a young adult, Maria (Saura Lightfoot-Leon) has thrived in a more structured home life, establishing a loving relationship with foster mom, Michelle (Samantha Spiro), and regularly goofing off and enjoying some nightlife with neighbor and best friend, Laraib (Deba Hekmat). When Laraib’s strict Kurdish father (Nabil Elouahabi) sends her away due to her free-spirited misbehavior, Maria’s attention turns to the visiting Michael (Joseph Quinn), a twentysomething who was also raised in foster care by Michelle. The two make an uncanny and profound connection, engaging in primally fueled roughhousing antics that amount to a strange mating ritual at times. Michael is also about to become a father, and his straight-laced girlfriend (Ceara Coveney) clearly presents a future of conformity versus the untethered passion he’s found with Maria.
Though Carmoon’s semiautobiographical film – at its end we see a brief clip of Carmoon’s grandmother, on whom Maria’s mother is based – was storyboarded, the director opted to provide her cast only minimal rehearsal time in an effort to increase unscripted improvisation and authentic spontaneity. Some interactions between Maria and Michael are crucial to the script, such as their reenactment of a scene in The Tin Drum (1979), which Cynthia is seen watching in the film’s first act, where they both spit mouthfuls of saliva into sherbert powder and consume the soupy mixture. In interviews, Carmoon has expressed her adoration for the more risqué themes and scenes found in German and French cinema, while describing the screenwriting process as “trauma therapy.” Moreover, she has stated, “I just want to make gross things that 14-year-old me would want to come across on [copyright-flouting streaming website] Putlocker after school.”
She certainly succeeds in that regard, going so far as to spray her sets with the scents of blood, sperm, sweat and saliva. The film finds Maria forging a connection with Michael in acts such as eating cremated remains from a cereal bowl or coaxing him to burn her stomach with an iron (a re-creation of a childhood accident) and then licking her damaged flesh, in a literal example of how Michael and Maria explore each other’s wounds. Carmoon’s ambitious film tends toward these types of heavy-handed metaphors; with her so affected by her childhood in a hoarding household, it feels contrived that Maria is drawn to a man who works as a garbage collector. Conversely, the film also feels aimless at times, due largely to the occasional unscripted sequences, making for a collection of strange behaviors and uncommon passions alternately coming across at times as too forced and other times as too loose.
The performances help gloss over these issues, however. As the young Maria, Leach’s poignant performance recalls the similarly unstructured childhood alongside a troubled mother found with Brooklynn Prince’s Moonee in The Florida Project. Meanwhile, the unhinged chemistry between Lightfoot-Leon’s and Quinn’s characters, two wounded souls who find joy in indulging primal impulses, makes the viewer care about each of these people, even as their continued involvement becomes more and more untenable when Maria begins to increasingly descend into recreating the environment and vivid memories of her youth. Despite its considerable flaws, Hoard succeeds in showing the strange and surreal avenues grief and tragedy can take a young person down, and the gleeful volatility inherent to finding someone whose on the same wavelength as one’s particular weirdness.
Photo courtesy of Sunrise Films
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