02/09/2023 - VENICE 2023: Taking place over a decade, British director Luna Carmoon’s feature debut sifts through the debris of memory and maternal estrangement

Saura Lightfoot Leon and Joseph Quinn in Hoard

Hoard [+see also:
trailer
interview: Luna Carmoon
film profile], the first feature from up-and-coming Brit Luna Carmoon, is a memory piece doused in mystery: you observe its lead character, Maria (played by Saura Lightfoot Leon through the majority of the film), internally recapturing and processing her past, but the audience isn’t necessarily let in. There are only her jerking movements and the shocks of recovered instances passing through her, where actual flashbacks or verbal exposition would otherwise be.

With her movie, premiering in the Venice International Film Critics’ Week, Carmoon has made a familiar debut in the idiom of British social realism, set in a claustrophobic world of hopelessness, in semi-detached houses and under overcast skies, which feels like it has branched off from Mike Leigh’s Life Is Sweet (and indeed, its primary setting of 1994 bolsters this comparison). Yet the director also conjures a certain feral intensity as her performers interact and act up, battering and collapsing into one another like socks in a tumble dryer.

Maria (Lily-Beau Leach in the opening segment) is a young girl with a mum, Cynthia (Hayley Squires), who loves her; outsiders to their bond – concerned headteachers, onlookers at the shops – worry otherwise. Cynthia works nights (we can perhaps guess at what) and spends her free time with Maria hoarding numerous junked items from nearby streets, and not throwing away anything perishable; of course, it’s a symptom of undiagnosed mental illness, but for Maria, the stacks of bric-a-brac grazing the ceilings embody her mum’s abundant love.

Roughly a quarter of the running time through, title cards confirm that 1984 has melted into 1994, and Maria (now Lightfoot Leon), has grown up with Michelle (Samantha Spiro) as her official carer and de facto step-mum; she’s left secondary school, but feels like she has to shake off an incumbent “hoard” of trauma and emotional baggage for comfortable adulthood to commence. Complicating this progress immensely are the occasional drop-ins of another of Michelle’s care children: this is Michael (Joseph Quinn, a popular young actor from Stranger Things and the upcoming Gladiator sequel), once a “crack baby”, now a garbageman and upcoming groom-to-be with quasi-incestuous eyes on his younger step-sister.

It’s a shame that this dynamic proceeds as fairly static throughout the film, although Carmoon’s direction of the pair is exacting, allowing them to create a turbulent anti-chemistry that intensifies through their raised voices and jolting joint movements, and then decompresses. Maria receives confirmation that her birth mother has died, with a container of ashes the latest charged physical object to add to her memory of her old house’s bounty of “things”, but there’s an odd comparison drawn between the deceased Cynthia and the very present Michael as near-antagonists to her in their respective parts of the narrative.

With its rangy length of over two hours, an undeniable inertia sets in, yet it feels like a consequence of Carmoon naturally sorting her way through the material she’s generated, impervious to what a producer or funder might decree as “too much”. With its retro but not regressive look back at past generations of British film (a trademark of its producer Anti Worlds), Hoard is a homegrown, spirited affair, with its overflowing branches never pruned, and always studded with thorns.

Hoard is a UK production, staged by Delaval Film, Erebus Pictures and Anti Worlds. Its world sales are overseen by Alpha Violet.

Photogallery 02/09/2023: Venice 2023 - Hoard

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Luna Carmoon, Saura Lightfoot Leon, Helen Simmons, Joseph Quinn
© 2023 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa - fadege.it, @fadege.it