SCREEN
Astartling debut; love and theft in Tuscany; platonic intimacy in the Baltic; Malaysian menstrual monsters, and more…
Fostering feelings: Joseph Quinn and Saura Lightfoot-Leon in Hoard
HOARD The most interesting British films of the past couple of years –Aftersun, All Of Us Strangers –have dealt with characters weighed down by unreckoned emotional inheritance from their parents. Few have quite so much baggage, however as Maria, the focus of Luna Carmoon’s Hoard, the most striking British debut of 2024. She has vast black binliners of the stuff, scoured from the dumps of South-East London, which she delights in bringing home, squirreling under the sofa, behind the radiator, into her bed…
We meet Maria as achild in the 1980s, living with her mum Cynthia in an Aladdin’s cave of tat –groaning shelves of VHS tapes, piles of clothes and food, aChristmas tree decorated with tin foil and dried orange peel, Fingerbobs on the telly and apet ferret gambolling over atuneless joanna. It’s abundantly plain that her mum (the sensational Hayley Squires) is fathoms deep into ahoarding disorder. Maria is bullied at school and feels some shame over the shambles of their home life. But for all the squalor (reaching down through the bin bags one morning Maria discovers the festering remains of arat king), there’s little emotional neglect –mother and daughter are united in nursery rhymes, playground games, what mum calls her “never-ending catalogue of love”.
Until, that is, Maria is whisked away into foster care. We meet Maria again, now played by Saura Lightfoot-Leon, as awillowy school leaver sometime in the early ’90s (Baby D’s deathless “Let Me Be Your Fantasy” is played at the pub disco). She seems happily readjusted, with acaring foster mum in acheerfully shabby terrace house. But her world is upended by the simultaneous disappearance of her best mate, acertain delivery and the arrival of strapping binman Michael, one of her new mum’s earlier foster children.