Programme Notes: Hoard

Unapologetic and unfiltered, Hoard is a bold coming-of-age psychodrama that tackles the mental strife of a young woman’s burgeoning sexuality after experiencing neglect. It is a brash, audacious and unfiltered debut film from Luna Carmoon, one that discusses the wounds that trauma inflicts, and the scars that form from generational mental illness with a compassion for the ugly truth of complicated love. Carmoon’s beautiful and odious character study premiered at Venice Film Festival in 2023 to a rapturous standing ovation, taking home the audience award and a nomination for Best Film at the festival.

The film is split into two timelines: 1984 and 1994. It opens in the earlier timeline, with a 6-year-old Maria (Lily-Beau Leach) nestled inside a shopping trolley, being pushed down a London street by her mother Cynthia (Hayley Squires). The trolley is piled high with the rubbish that they have pilfered from other people’s bins, yet Maria is proudly placed upon it. Cynthia has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which manifests in the literal hoarding of rubbish – keep your eyes peeled for the wondrous birds-eye slow pull that shows the extent of this hoarding – but Cynthia’s proudest hoard is her daughter. Because Hoard is, above all else, a story about misguided love. However, while Cynthia loves Maria, she cannot provide a healthy, hygienic environment for her and social services place Maria in foster care.

This idea of misguided love is exhibited more so as lust in the second timeline, where the now fostered Maria (Saura Proudfoot-Leon) begins a sexual relationship with a much older man Michael (Joseph Quinn). Michael is a former foster child and gets obsessed with Maria through their similarly lived experiences. The sexual energy between them is feral and a wholly new experience for Maria. But this affection from Michael brings the trauma that Maria experienced while with her mother back up to the surface. Maria, now living in a hygienic house with a loving foster mother, begins experiencing an emotional regression and starts hoarding like her mother did. 

Carmoon spoke to Loud and Clear Reviews about writing Hoard during Covid. ‘I wrote the film in the spring of 2020, during lockdown. None of us knew our future, or what was happening. I was very isolated in my shed. My brain just started to, you know, run back to the past… Writing Hoard was about immortalising the women who raised me. There was a primitive bond between me and my nan.’ [1] The film is extraordinarily sensory, with visual cues of mould and decay that specifically invoke the sense of smell. At one point during Hoard, Maria says that she can smell the memory of her mum. For a-rabbitsfoot.com, Carmoon spoke of her time writing: ‘I lost my sense of smell because of Covid… In its place, I started to taste the essences of time. When I was writing Hoard, I got this weird metallic taste in my mouth.’[2] One of the feelings you can expect to have while watching the film is a sense of disorientation. This is deliberately so. Carmoon would explain ‘There’s dialogue that Laraib (Deba Hekmat) has said to Maria in the future that you hear in the past, so when you come to hear them in the film’s present, the hope is that subconsciously you experience that disorienting feeling associated with deja-vu.’

The ever-brilliant Hayley Squires, best known for her role in I, Daniel Blake (Dir. Ken Loach, 2016), plays Cynthia, who is described by Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian as having ‘beady-eyed gusto.’  Cynthia spends the earlier timeline caked in old make-up, the kind that looks to be decaying as much as her treasure trove of trash is. Carmoon worked with casting director Heather Basten on all her short films, and is responsible for Squires’ casting, stating in Loud and Clear that she ‘was always going to be the mother. When I wrote the script, it could only ever be her.’ On casting Joseph Quinn as Michael, the sickly, sweaty and slightly predatory love interest of Maria, Carmoon says that she first saw him in British television shows such as Howard’s End (Dir. Hettie MacDonald, 2017). Quinn is best known for his role as Eddie in Season 4 of Stranger Things (Matt and Ross Duffer, 2022), but Carmoon says that the ‘girlies who love him [in Stranger Things] are just not going to expect the rawness and ugly of his performance.’ As for Quinn himself, his response to casting was of excitement. He said [about the script] that it was ‘feral, and brave, and mad!’

Getting the script seen was the hard part for Carmoon, whose elevator pitch declared it as ‘body horror for the mind’ prior to filming, but references this as the pitch genesis, where Hoard then flourished from. In GamesRadar.com, she speaks about this pitch: ‘I pitched it like that in an actual cheeky way because people fund horror much easier in this country. I pitched it as a body horror of the brain because what's more horrifying than entering a psychosis and having a nervous breakdown...but I mean [it is a body horror] as much as The Piano Teacher (Dir. Michael Haneke, 2001) is a body horror.’[3] As to the films that inspired Hoard, noted surrealist horror filmmaker David Cronenberg is a point of reference. Carmoon details her love for his work, stating they are about ‘the horrifying nature of humans: it's beautiful and ugly, but we all exist like that.’ But it is Paul Verhoeven that Carmoon makes use of: ‘I love early Verhoeven. I’m sure you can see parts of Spetters (1980) and Turkish Delight (1973) in Hoard.’

To experience Hoard is to experience something completely unique. It looks to remove the sheen on working class stories, finding vibrancy in its obfuscating squalor. It’s shocking but arousing, and marks Carmoon as one of the brightest new talents on the British film scene. As Carmoon says, ‘the fact that everyone is gonna feel something, something different, and experience something different from it is what makes cinema so special.’

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