‘Hoard’ Review: Dirty Romancing (original) (raw)

Critic’s Pick

A spiraling teenager and a tenderhearted garbage collector bond over debris in this stunningly unconventional drama.

Two people look into each other's eyes in a close-up film still. One wears a thin gold chain and red undershirt. The other has bare shoulders.

Saura Lightfoot Leon and Joseph Quinn in “Hoard.”Credit...Sunrise Films

Sept. 5, 2024

Hoard

NYT Critic’s Pick

Directed by Luna Carmoon

Drama

Not Rated

2h 6m

Mothering and madness, trash and trauma erect an empire of filth in “Hoard,” Luna Carmoon’s gut-punchingly original first feature. In scenes that can shift from warily unsettling to plainly disgusting, Carmoon rubs our noses in the dreadful consequences of maternal dysfunction.

For Maria (a captivating Lily-Beau Leach), the grotty home in London that she shares with her mother, Cynthia (Hayley Squires), may be rank and rodent-rich, but it’s filled with magic and love. Together, they sing and play games among the fruits of their nightly rummage through neighborhood dumpsters. At school, though, Maria is too ripe and sleep deprived to make friends.

“I’m ashamed of us,” she complains to her mother. Yet “Hoard” is no parable of poverty, as we see when the film leaps forward 10 years to the mid-1990s and Maria, now a vivacious 18-year-old and played by the remarkable Saura Lightfoot Leon, is warmly settled with a loving foster mother (Samantha Spiro). This hard-won stability is threatened when Maria meets Michael (Joseph Quinn), a garbage collector and former foster child who is approaching 30 and on the verge of marriage. Drawn to the scent of each other’s damage, they begin to play their own increasingly dangerous games.

Though at times squirmingly unpleasant, “Hoard” is never a drag. The insolence of the filmmaking and the artlessness of the leads energize a plot of stunning recklessness and unexpected humor. Combining joy and tragedy, realism and surrealism, Carmoon — who completed the film before she was 25 — loiters defiantly on incidents of distressing rawness. To Maria, trash is her turn-on, her safety blanket and the keeper of her memories, and Lightfoot Leon plays her with unselfconscious abandon**.** Like the heroine of David Wnendt’s provocative second feature, “Wetlands,” Maria is an eager explorer in the realm of the senses. She may sometimes gross you out, but you won’t easily look away.

Hoard
Not rated. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. In theaters.

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