‘Hoard’: Venice Review

Dir/scr: Luna Carmoon. UK. 2023. 126 mins

A highly unusual South East London childhood with her obsessive hoarder mother feels sparkling and magical to seven-year-old Maria. And when a tragedy separates them, Maria is taken into foster care to live in a more conventional but no less loving environment. Ten years later, the now-teenage Maria feels compelled to reconnect with her mother in the only way she knows: through bin-dipping for discarded treasures and collecting black bags full of festering rubbish. This visceral first feature from Luna Carmoon is, like its central character, unfettered, uninhibited and bracingly unusual. It also shares less positive traits with Maria: this is unfiltered filmmaking that indulges every storytelling whim, however uncomfortable it might turn out to be.

Unfiltered film-making

Self-taught filmmaker Carmoon (a Screen Star Of Tomorrow in 2022) cut her teeth with a series of short films, including the Film4 production Shagbands and her debut Nosebleed, both of which premiered at BFI London Film Festival. The shorts, like this feature, draw on what Carmoon describes as “the mythology of her own memories”. In the case of Hoard, the story is a fictionalised version of real-life events, with the mother character loosely based on Carmoon’s grandmother, who appears in a home video clip at the end of the film. The highly personal nature of the storytelling, plus the relish with which the film embraces the more unsavoury extremes of the hoarder impulse, could limit the picture’s commercial potential, although interest in Carmoon’s distinctive vision and fiercely original voice might sustain some domestic theatrical interest following its Venice Critics Week premiere.

In the earlier section of the film, unfolding in 1984, Carmoon seeds the disquietingly matter-of-fact oddness that will re-emerge in her central character later on. Maria, played as an impish child by Lily-Beau Leach, doesn’t question the skewed values that her mother (Haley Squires) places on the detritus that other people discard without a thought. The remnants of her packed lunch – tangerine peel and balls of foil – must be brought home from school. To fail to do so, Maria understands implicitly, is a declaration of war on the delicate balance of her mother’s mental health.

A Christmas surprise, lovingly collected by her mother over months, is a large sweet jar filled with stumps of coloured chalk. There are other, less welcome surprises. Maria reaches under a pile of cardboard and finds something sticky and rotten: her mother explains that it’s a decaying ‘rat king’ (a mass of rodents whose tails have become knotted together). The film’s production design strikes a delicate balance between the child’s eye view of a glistening treasure trove and the reality, of a nervous breakdown playing out one cluttered room at a time.

As a teenager in 1994, Maria (Saura Lightfoot Leon) is a misfit even if the full dysfunction of her early childhood is latent. She’s safe in the space of her friendship with best buddy Laraib (Deba Hekmat) but when Laraib is sent away as a punishment by her strict father, Maria loses her anchor. Around the same point a stranger comes into her life; Michael (Joseph Quinn), who once lived with Maria’s foster mother Michelle (Samantha Spiro).

Maria sees in him broken edges and a tendency towards self-destruction that matches her own. He sees in her a beguiling wildness and a fascinating alternative to the beige conformity of his future with his pregnant girlfriend. There’s a chemistry between them, but the explosive kind – they are catalysts to each other’s most excessive tendencies. And for Maria, that involves excavating her memories and enacting her mother’s obsessions. But the closer she gets to her mother, the more she disappears under a layer of accumulated filth. It’s a demanding watch, packed with moments so queasily distasteful you can practically smell them.