Hoard
‘You’re a funny little biscuit’
Few films are this sensory and results in such a visceral film experience. The story of a teenage girl (Saura Lightfoot-Leon), her childhood with her hoarding mother (Hayley Squires) and her problematic entanglement with an older man (Joseph Quinn) in the present day, evokes all of the senses – from the tactile touch of another person to the accidentally groped slime from under a stack of rubbish to the prevailing smell of waste that hovers of the film itself. Every sense is called upon to convey the sense of grief that weighs upon Maria, the loneliness that prevails within her and that, upon meeting Quinn’s binman Michael, is no longer something she can ignore and repress.
Within Michael, a previous resident of her foster mother (Samantha Spiro, who is fantastic and wonderful to watch as a positive representation of foster parenting), there is a similar darkness and their meeting is something alike kindred spirts. But what follows isn’t a love story, it’s a consumption rooted in the animalistic – of no-holes-bared feeling, where the act of finally being perceived results in an omnipresent feeling of danger & uncertainty. It’s extraordinarily depicted due to the performances, with Lightfoot-Leon’s Maria being unknowable to the point of almost mythical – physically present but emotionally distant to all but an appointed few. Michael is almost twice Maria’s age, which could have been depicted in a certain near-expected way in terms of power dynamics. Instead Quinn’s Michael is a multitude of grey, part-hero and part-distress. A soon-to-be father, there’s a sense that he’s torn between rescuing Maria and wanting to be rescued from the parental role that shortly awaits him.
Writer-director Luna Carmoon’s script depicts their dynamics with such tender brutality, it’s somehow both matter-of-fact yet ultimately incomprehensible. Like the film overall, a blend of British realism with a strain of either sublime or surreal that is apparent within both Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun (currently available on BBC iPlayer) and Charlotte Regan’s Scrapper (BFI Player). The trio of films not only share white-boy-of-the-month (Paul Mescal and Harris Dickinson respectively) but they are also bittersweet reflections of parental relationships, of figures who clearly love their children but have an internalised barrier that distorts their relationship with their child and, quite possibly, the adult they will become.
A hauntingly vivid mediation on love, loss and longing.
[4/5 stars]
Hoard is in UK cinemas now.
Charlotte Sometimes 