A social realist psychodrama of amour fou here in this fiercely intense and often macabre tale from feature first-timer Luna Carmoon, showing how suppressed childhood trauma blossoms into a secret theatre of adult dysfunction and delusion, but it’s also a story in which Carmoon finds the possibility of redemption and escape. Hoard is all the more intriguing for being a very personal project for Carmoon, something made clear in what appears to be an analogue-video home movie clip over the closing credits.
In its study of loneliness and a kind of marooned and thwarted sexuality, Hoard is in some ways like early Ian McEwan such as The Cement Garden – although the lead character has conceived a bizarre obsession with Volker Schlöndorff’s movie The Tin Drum, particularly the scene of little Oskar Matzerath’s sexual awakening in the form of spitting into a handful of sherbet.
The story is in two parts. In the first, set sometime around the mid-late 70s, Maria (played by newcomer Lily-Beau Leach) is a bewildered 10-year-old girl living with her deeply troubled single mum, Cynthia, played with beady-eyed gusto by Hayley Squires. Cynthia is utterly devoted to Maria but in the grip of an obsessive-compulsive disorder, which means she fanatically scavenges things that people have thrown away, or perhaps more-or-less in-date food discarded from supermarkets, taking her little girl with her after school on late-night raids on grim areas behind buildings where the bins are kept. Cynthia is a hoarder, and their flat becomes increasingly filled with dubious, unhygienic rubbish kept in teeteringly unsafe piles.
This is poor Cynthia’s way of showing love for Maria, fiercely collecting every possible thing for her as a way of being a good parent and providing for her. And Maria unhesitatingly accepts this universe of dreck as evidence of her love: an Aladdin’s non-cave of detritus.
Part two fast-forwards us into Maria’s new life as a school leaver, now played by Saura Lightfoot Leon, a smart, hyperactive, but lonely and weird teen living with a kindly foster mother – a warm and sympathetic performance from Samantha Spiro. Maria has absolutely no idea what to do with her life now school has come to an end and her best mate has been taken away from her by a sternly religious father.
It is at this fraught moment that one of the foster mother’s former charges comes back into her life to say hello: Michael, played by Joseph Quinn, a guy in his late 20s who is deeply affectionate to his foster mum. Thanks to her, he has turned his life around, with a job and a fiancee. But from the moment he sets eyes on Maria he becomes obsessed with her as his foster sibling, and Carmoon shows how Michael absorbs and shares her unhappiness and her inchoate sexual longing. They embark on a kind of feral affair.
As for Maria herself, this growing relationship with Michael sends her closer to a kind of breakdown, made worse by a sudden reminder of her mother and she begins secretly stealing bits of rubbish and hiding it in the house, unconsciously seeking to recreate the comforting womb of garbage from which she was expelled by social services as a little girl. There is a brilliant scene in which Maria is playing snooker in a pub with a flirtatious posh boy, and the smell of the cue chalk sends into a reverie she can’t explain. (But it could have something to do with the glass jar full of chalk that Cynthia gave her as a little girl.)
Everything and the kitchen sink is thrown into this deeply strange and emotionally extravagant story with its continuous topnote of hysteria: and there’s a lot of storytelling substance. Hoard isn’t perfect but its pure vehemence and the commitment of its performances are arresting.
• Hoard screened at the Venice film festival, and is in UK and Irish cinemas from 17 May.
