Luna Carmoon, the debutant writer-director of this mesmerically strange drama, claims she secretly sprayed its set with a perfume smelling of semen, sweat, milk and blood, which may explain the instinctively unhinged performances she draws from her cast. Set in the Eighties and Nineties, Hoard is the story of the traumatised free spirit Maria, played at the age of 8 by Lily-Beau Leach and at 18 by Saura Lightfoot Leon, who gives an extraordinary performance.
Carmoon has said the film began as a suicide note when she had lockdown-induced depression and that the act of writing it may have saved her. There’s certainly an authenticity to Maria’s emotional odyssey, as there is to the re-creation of working-class southeast London, where Carmoon came of age.
The
