A feature debut from writer-director Luna Carmoon, after some time spent honing her craft in a variety of shorts, Hoard is a film as strange and difficult to pin down as the main character hiding in the litter-strewn heart of it. It's about mental health and unhealthy ways of showing affection, and it's about repeating cycles, but it's equally about making major mistakes as you struggle to find your place in a world that doesn't always make much sense.
Saura Lightfoot-Leon plays Maria, a young woman who has spent a lot of her life in the care of a foster mother named Michelle (Samantha Spiro). The opening scenes show us young Maria (Lily-Beau Leach) living her life in the orbit of her spiralling mother (Hayley Squires), and it's clear that her past is full of moments that cannot be easily forgotten and shaken away. In fact, things start to come back to the front of Maria's mind, just as Michelle has a visiting guest in the form of Michael (Joseph Quinn), a young man she cared for as a child. Michael and Maria start to connect, but maybe they would be best keeping away from one another.
This is a film with some interesting ideas, but those interesting ideas are often sidelined in favour of moments that don't feel worthy of inclusion. Carmoon has something to say, and she has a clear and strong voice with which to say it, but she seems to have perhaps done herself a disservice by assembling a cast that she knows can sell the more theatrical sequences, which also happen to be the least interesting parts of the movie.
Lightfoot-Leon is superb, giving the kind of performance that marks her out as one to watch over the next few years, and both Spiro and Squires are fantastic in very different ways. Deba Hekmat is also very good, playing Maria's friend, Laraib, and there are solid supporting turns from Cathy Tyson, in a very small role, and Tim Bowie, among others. It's Quinn who proves to be the weak link, sadly, but I blame the script for that more than his performance. He's asked to act in a way that never feels natural, and I know that there's a much better version of this film without his character in it.
The look and feel of the whole thing is great throughout, you can really feel and smell every bit of dirt and nastiness that occasionally fills the screen, and there's a third act that defies the odds to become an ultimately satisfying conclusion to a wildly uneven journey, Carmoon and her team, behind and in front of the camera, all deserve a good bit of praise. It's just a shame that everything is undermined by one or two major problems with the plotting, especially when one important event never seems to lead to the expected major consequences.
Certainly not rubbish, but there are times when you will want to wash your hands after rummaging through everything to find the small nuggets of treasure buried amidst the mess.
7/10
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