Writer and Director: Luna Carmoon
As with several films at this year’s BFI London Film Festival, Luna Carmoon begins with an excellent idea, a film that has spark for the first 30-minutes, establishing an intriguing and unusual premise that should carry through the movie. Yet Hoard changes tack too soon and the more interesting story it begins to tell is lost in a less substantial narrative about teenage mental health, inappropriate men and maternal bonds, only character behaviour is insufficiently grounded in any psychological frame and instead looks to shock with extreme behaviours and gross-out moments.
Extremely close to her mother, Maria enjoys a magical world of play and excitement, but their small home is a filled to the brim with junk which Cynathia collects and refuses to let go of. When a tragic accident puts Maria into the foster care system, she is sent to a very different home to be looked after by a substitute mother who ends up raising her. When her best friend moves away after A-levels and former foster child Michael returns to stay, Maria is destabilised for the first time in years and begins to behave erratically.
Hoard is a film that you want to like so much and for at least 30-minutes you really do, drawing a portrait of complex and intriguing single-parenthood in which the child’s life is fundamentally shaped by the personality and mental health challenges of the mother. And this opening section is so great, the depictions Cynthia’s hoarding, the difficulties that young Maria’s experiences at school when she’s unable to find her PE kit and the complicated love-shame relationship that develops between them.
And then Hayley Squires’ Cynathia is cast aside for a less well rendered story about Maria years later that is looking to explore the long-term effects of this mother-daughter relationship during a time of mental crisis. But this part of Carmoon’s debut film is far less convincing, relying on multiple conveniences to make the increasingly odd plot fit together including the idea that her foster mother played by Samantha Spiro, a nurse, wouldn’t notice dramatic changes in behaviour or the breaching of her once spotlessly clean house over several months.
Drawing-on the gross-out movies of the 2000s but inserted into a social realist style, Carmoon suggests the effect of Maria’s hoarding and her naturally grubby desires using food fights, bizarre sexual experimentation with a man more than 10-years older than her and a scene with some human ashes that is as unpleasant as it is unnecessary. Yet, what Hoard really has to say about this scenario, about the triggers for Maria’s decline and what the hoarding provides is far less clear.
Saura Lightfoot Leon gives a solid performance as a girl on the edge, but this is really Hayley Squires film for the brief time she appears in it. If Carmoon had remained with her character, investigated the reason behind her style of living, the possible trauma that sits behind it and why the two isolated themselves from the world through their own semi-magical reality, then Hoard’s jump forward to Maria’s challenges in later life would have made far more sense.
Hoard is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2023.
