‘It’s peppered with my past and memories’
◆ Joseph Quinn, Saura Lightfoot Leon, Hayley Squires and director Luna Carmoon talk to Rachael Davis about Hoard, a story of love and trauma
In London, 1984, sevenyear-old Maria and her mum Cynthia have cocooned themselves in a loving home full of treasures they’ve collected. They live like magpies, searching the streets and rubbish bins for shiny prizes and pretty presents, all to add to the piles of things which tower in every room of their little house.
One night, however, disaster strikes and their world of treasure comes crumbling down. Then we meet Maria ten years later, a teenager living with her foster mother and grappling with the path her life has taken and the toll it has bestowed – until Michael, fellow foster child all grown up, opens her up to a new world swirling with madness, magic and shared trauma.
Hoard, the debut film from British director Luna Carmoon, tells a comingof-age story like no other, dripping with psychodrama and absurdism carried by stellar performances from a cast which includes Stranger Things’ Joseph Quinn, I, Daniel Blake’s Hayley Squires, and Masters Of The Air’s Saura Lightfoot Leon.
“Every character is birthed out of the idea of someone I loved and grew up with, and it’s all filmed where I live… It’s peppered with my past and memories, but mainly the kind of feelings, like that sort of invisible line of me trying to lasso (those) feelings that come back, that we have no control of,” says Lewishamborn Carmoon of the film’s heart.
In the first section of the film, we are swept into the world of hoarding by Hayley Squires’ performance as Cynthia. A working-class single mum, the sheer amount of love she has for her little Maria – played by Lilybeau Leach for this earlier segment – is immediately evident, offering an insight into the psychology of hoarding.
Squires says she researched the psychological components “a little bit, but not massively”, because the film is told through Maria’s eyes, but she notes that “there’s moments, obviously, where Cynthia suffers”.
“She has episodes where it kicks off for her… It goes from being this magical thing that’s for her daughter to this compulsion,” says the 36-year-old actress, who won an Emmy for her lead role in TV drama Adult Material.
“But I didn’t want to go too far into that, the thing of her being ill, which clearly she’s suffering from something, but again, because it’s through how Maria remembers it, and creating that world for her, I didn’t want to cross too far into that.
“I know that it became a very big phenomenon amongst people after the Second World War, or children of the Second World War, so elderly people now… a big part of that was because of the fact that they had been children through the Second World War, and then postthat with rationing, and no-one having anything, so as they got older, they held onto things, like held onto newspapers, or milk cartons, or things that seem very, very insignificant,” she continues.
“And I think the big part of hoarding… I think a lot of it’s to do with safety, and people feeling very, very unsafe if they’re unable to keep those things.”
The story jumps forward a decade after a catastrophic night, and we meet Maria again as a teenager living with her foster mum Michelle, played by Game Of Thrones’ and Sex Education’s Samantha Spiro. Maria is grappling with all the things teenagers do, but with the added impact of the trauma she suffered as a child from her chaotic home life, which Carmoon portrays with a deliciously absurdist style of filmmaking.
“The very first thing that hit me was (that) it was very animalistic,” says Saura Lightfoot Leon, who plays teenage Maria.
“It was very feral. I liked the wildness of it. I had never read, personally, a female written so grounded, and also fiery. It was very unexpected.”
“It was a lot of material that I hadn’t seen in a script before,” agrees Joseph Quinn, who plays Michelle’s former foster child Michael.
“It was exploring themes about these human beings that felt pretty universal, like grief, separation, trauma, all these things that many of us as human beings will experience in a life, but explored in a way that felt very innovative, and absurd, and unusual.”
Quinn, who is best known for playing Eddie Munson in the fourth season of Netflix’s Stranger Things, says he threw himself into the challenge of Carmoon’s filmmaking style.
“You get accustomed to Luna’s vernacular through making the film, because you get to a scene and it feels very odd, she’s like: ‘Well obviously, we’re in the absurd now’,” he says.
While Hoard is, at times, something of a visual rollercoaster, as Quinn says, there’s a human story of love and connection at its heart, whether that be the connection of mother and daughter, or that of young people with a unique, shared experience.
“They create a language together, they create a love language together,” says Lightfoot Leon of Maria and Michael’s relationship.
“It involves memories, games, of sorts. They become entangled. And Maria becomes entangled with the past, and Michael becomes entangled with Maria.
“There’s the familiarity of trauma, and there’s grief, and there’s also the familiarity of the home as well – both of them have spent significant amounts of time there, so it fosters that kind of wild relationship.”