Critics reviews

Carmoon’s depiction of trauma, grief and mental health in crisis as a kind of putrid, repellent stench that clings to the skin, stings the eyeballs and turns the stomach makes for a queasily insalubrious viewing experience. Hoard is a film I admire, but struggle to like.

Most exciting of all, though, is its sense of promise: like every great first feature, Hoard makes you desperate to see what else its maker’s mind has in it.

Spit-soaked and admirably weird though it is, Hoard just doesn’t quite build to saying anything about its own grossness.

Wielding disgust like a weapon to fascinate and upset the viewer, the film develops an intrepid mix of mucky moods and tones, sprinkled through its disturbing encounters. Rather than the contrived sensationalism of Saltburn (2023), Hoard is a film you can virtually smell.

Overall, Hoard is wayward, febrile, not easily digestible. Carmoon hits the raucous high notes too much of the time, but it is a striking anomaly nowadays to find a British film railing so furiously against the tasteful and the odourless. Chaotic as it is, Hoard’s acrid punk perversity is quite some opening statement.

The film is astonishingly vivid, involving and affecting. This is fully realised, highly original cinema of a kind rarely seen from contemporary British film-makers (Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun excepted).

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.

This is an uncompromising film that's unafraid to wade in discomfort, for better or for worse.

Carmoon has an eye for the same kind of scuzzy poetics that distinguished the early films of Lynne Ramsay and Andrea Arnold, but she has a bolshy style that’s all her own. Not everything coheres in Hoard, but its endless cinematic invention marks Carmoon out as one of the boldest voices to emerge on the UK scene for quite some time.

Moving between alluringly strange and sickeningly depraved without compromising the moving themes that underpin its protagonist’s journey, there’s nothing out there like the visionary genius of Carmoon’s Hoard, marking her as a promising new filmmaker.

This is an audacious feature debut that shows a director champing at the bit to throw even more bizarre imagery at you. Fantastic performances abound, with Leon an up-and-coming star and Quinn firmly breaking out of the Eddie Munson shadow. However, its mishandling of mental illness and an unearned ending are too apparent to be ignored.

Luna Carmoon’s debut feature about the daughter of a hoarder comes home bearing prizes... announcing a young British talent capable of blending realism with surrealism to create a vivid personal language that defies simple interpretations.