Hoard review: Social realism meets gross-out horror in bold British debut | LFF 2023

Luna Carmoon’s feature film debut Hoard announces itself as a distinctive voice in British film, taking elements of disparate genres and creating a bizarre patchwork of it all. Like the devilish bigger sister to Charlotte Regan’s Scrapper, it plays with the look of social realism and morphs it into its own unique beast. 

Scattered throughout the film are moments of near fantasy. Enthralling, dizzying camerawork transforms bedsheets into fantastical gateways and letterboxes into magical shafts of light. A sense of play underlines the film as the plot progresses in an ambitious, almost surreal fashion. Ignoring traditional narratives, it instead follows the logic of memory to progress its story. 

The story itself is told in two parts as the extended prologue concerns Maria as a child being raised by her struggling single mother. Hayley Squires (I, Daniel Blake) is Cynthia, who talks in rhyming riddles, obsesses over small details and speaks of her hoarded things as a “catalogue of love” to her daughter. Here the film is at its cleanest, being an endearing tale of a mother-daughter bond despite their difficult circumstances as they live in a house surrounded by collected trinkets and bags of rubbish. 

Cut forward ten years or so and Maria is now finishing high school, confronting these parts of her past in increasingly strange ways. Saura Lightfoot Leon and Joseph Quinn (Stranger Things) are as remarkable as Maria and Michael, both embodying the instability of youth (despite the latter being a man in his 30s).  Their relationship glides past and transgresses boundaries, forming both the film’s heart and its enemy. There is a menacing edge to the way they interact but also something intangibly fixating too. 

Hoard is as stylistically bold as something like Madeline’s Madeline and yet stays grounded in its recognisable British setting and relatable humour. This mix unsettles and excites in equal parts as the film takes you down its bizarre rabbit hole. There’s a lot of gross imagery here, some of which veers into being genuinely off-putting as the film traverses between coming of age comedy and psychological horror.

Ultimately it becomes a bold off-kilter tone poem exploring grief, family ties and growing up. At times I was disgusted but nevertheless always transfixed. I can’t wait to see what Carmoon does next. 

3/5

Hoard will be released in cinemas on October 20 2023.