Seek out this stunning, empathetic and radical British debut from first-time British filmmaker Luna Carmoon.
Please take a knee, hoist those petticoats/breeches, and welcome one of the most distinctive new voices in British cinema: the supremely talented southeast Londoner, Luna Carmoon. Her elegantly scruffy and emotionally complex debut feature Hoard is a must-see for anyone interested in challenging, original, cliché-avoiding art. It’s a film that heads to the shadowy spots that most filmmakers on this sceptred isle don’t even know exist; every frame exuding both a breathless confidence and a warped visual literacy which suggests a director on a mission to do anything to make an audience feel something – which is completely refreshing to behold.
The title refers to the nocturnal activities of Cynthia (a heartbreaking Hayley Squires), an eccentric single mother who raises her daughter Maria (Lily-Beau Leach) with a tactile tenderness while heading out to hoard items of rubbish that others have tossed away. Their house contains teetering piles of scavenged matter and has its own fuggy microclimate. The families of rodents who have moved are welcomed with glowing eyes and open arms. The social stigma of what is crudely referred to as the “Bag Lady” is completely ignored, and Cynthia’s wide-eyed passion is presented as an extension of her apparently bottomless capacity for love and compassion.
Maria is the film’s central focus, and it’s fascinating to witness a depiction of alternative parenting that is wholly non-judgmental. If anything Carmoon accentuates the positives – the warming, cocoon-like idyl that this twosome have constructed for themselves – rather than tut-tutting at the attendant health hazards that come from living in such self-engineered squalor. This is a film that promotes love in any-which-way, uncovering all its strange, unrecognisable guises and saying that’s it’s okay even when it’s ostensibly very fucked up.
And on that note, following the culmination of its extended opening chapter, the film boldly leaps forward in time and we reconvene with Maria (beautifully played by Saura Lightfoot Leon) who is now older, a little wiser, but still suffused with many of the antisocial impulses of her wayward mother. We learn that she has spent her teenage years in foster care, and that her guardian Michelle (Samantha Spiro) is loving and maternal, albeit in a more conventional manner. Has there ever been a film that has presented foster parenting in such an affirmative way?
With school almost over, Maria has to make decisions on how she will move forward in life, but she instead descends into a surreal limbo, where her basic abilities for self-care have suddenly shut down. There’s a suggestion she may be transforming into her now-estranged mother. She enters into a mutually-aggressive, erotically-charged relationship with Joseph Quinn’s Michael, one of Michelle’s former foster kids, who draws out (and is fascinated by) some of Maria’s curious sexual peccadilloes.
The situation that Carmoon cultivates is one that you can’t take your eyes off of while also wanting to constantly look away from. There are some ingeniously repulsive set-pieces that tickle both funny bone and gag reflex, but nothing is done for its own sake, for unsolicited provocation. Everything is at the service of enhancing character and mood.
Eventually, Hoard is revealed as a deeply moving ode to the different paths we take in search of love, happiness and acceptance, and formally the film ascribes to its own thesis by avoiding so many of the prosaic platitudes and visual “moves” that apparently must feature in any and all British film productions. Carmoon is someone who wears her extensive cinephile knowledge lightly, and does not toss in homages or references to the filmmakers who have inspired her, instead opting to speak with her own voice. Yet what we can say is she is clearly taking in restorative waters from the same pool that Lynne Ramsay was supping from when she made Ratcatcher, and there can be no higher praise than that.
Little White Lies is committed to championing great movies and the talented people who make them.
Published 14 May 2024
Divisive but intriguing early word from the film’s festival run.
Takes you on a wild journey. And as a filmmaker, Carmoon is a one-woman war on cliché.
Proudly strange and provocative, but a major debut all the same.
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