Hoard
Written and Directed by Luna Carmoon
Starring Saura Lightfoot Leon, Joseph Quinn, Hayley Squires, Samantha Spiro
Runtime 126 minutes
US premiere 6 September 2024 (world premiere 2 September 2023, Venice Film Festival)
Available in select theaters

by Carmen Paddock, Staff Writer

Sometimes one gets a sense that a filmmaker is striving to be odder and stranger than suits their natural instincts; this is not the case with writer-director Luna Carmoon. Still in her twenties, Carmoon possesses a genuinely unforced comfort with the weird which comes through candidly in her uncompromising debut feature Hoard. Seeing her next steps and the development of her voice promises exciting possibilities for British independent cinema.

Maria’s life with her mother Cynthia (Hayley Squires) is magical through one lens, frightening through the other. Cynthia’s hoarding, to the point of collecting glass bottles from dumpsters, fills Maria’s world with trinkets that turn dangerous and isolating in an instant. At one point, a rat king is even pulled from the rubble, like a storybook omen. This peace cannot last; after a shocking turn of events, the film cuts to Maria as a teenager living with foster mother Michelle (Samathan Spiro). As she awaits her A-level results, Michelle’s former foster Michael (Joseph Quinn) returns for a visit, setting in motion a harrowing series of events as Maria reckons with new emotions and her past trauma. Hoard is not true body horror, but some sequences of physical and sexual discovery are all the more sickening for their plausibility.

Double-casting child and adult versions of the same character is a careful balancing act, and it is pulled off superbly in Hoard. Both Lily-Beau Leach as child Maria and Saura Lightfoot-Leon as teenage Maria are able to physicalize the character’s instincts and reactions – often awkward and counter-intuitive – with naturalism and honesty. Both Maria’s instinctive self-preservation freezes and her impulsive self-destructive explorations are wholly understandable, defined by her sense of self as well as the extreme circumstances to which she finds herself repeatedly drawn. Carmoon trusts that viewers will go with Maria on her journey, never over-explaining her understanding of the world or her motivations. Both actresses are wholly up to this task, and with each only having minor credits to date, bright futures beckon.

Heather Basten’s excellent casting is proven out among the supporting performers. Quinn proves his indie film bona fides after A Quiet Place: Day One and sheds his Stranger Things lovability to become a quietly discomfiting and troublingly unknowable figure. Michael is a textbook groomer but Maria’s attraction to him – as a person and a possibility – does not defy belief. As Maria’s two mother figures, both Spiro and Squires avoid their easy stereotypes as the sensible foster parent and the irresponsible young mother – a feat achieved through two excellent performances and the strength of Carmoon’s script. Michelle loves her charges and takes no nonsense from them, but the line between care, concern, and intervention emerges organically to the circumstances without ever feeling like a plot device to drive Maria’s story forward. Squires is magnetic as Cynthia, whose fierce love for Maria (and lovability as a character) is irrevocably intertwined with her fantasies and paranoia.

The primary weakness of Hoard is that, at 126 minutes, its eerie magic feels stretched thin across the runtime. The first half’s languorous pacing – especially when young Maria is living with her mother – establishes the offputting, precarious, even repulsive world she inhabits (and the fact that her daily routine is utterly ordinary to her), but the second half’s meandering dilutes the impact of Maria’s self-discovery.

The almost-adult Maria opens and closes the film with blistering, quasi-poetic voiceover, anchoring her as storyteller and active agent rather than passive victim of circumstance. No easy answers come out of Hoard, and the film is stronger for it – this a voyage into the unknown, and a meditation on past cycles of violence will sit with audiences long after the credits roll.