Unlike most coming-of-age tales, there's a significant chunk of a young person's most formative years missing from Hoard. Instead, it's broken into two sections: 1980s Maria is a young girl at primary school, learning to live with her mother's hoarding habits; 1990s Maria is older, and somewhat directionless after leaving school and reflecting back on her unusual life. It's worth getting out of the way now that Saura Lightfoot Leon and Lily-Beau Leach bring a youthful, tormented energy to Maria, and neither deserves to shoulder the blame for the rest of Hoard's failings.
It's always troublesome to criticise something made with such personal investment and emotion. Clearly developed from a place of intimacy, Carmoon should be commended for her full-speed approach to Hoard, clearly eager to make a mark in her debut. In the first act, such promise is demonstrated in Carmoon's understanding of space - both literally and figuratively between mother and daughter - and is portrayed with remarkable sophistication. Aided by cinematographer Nanu Segal's cinematography, beautifully rendered in this opening stretch with a surprising authenticity, Carmoon's work is charged with complete confidence in her own vision, and lands on something equally devastating and comforting in her depiction of a cluttered lifestyle.
But as that chapter wraps up, there's over an hour still to go, and in the remaining runtime, the film collapses under the weight of its impossible ambition. What proceeds is a chaotic assortment of themes, narrative beats, characters and relationships that are exceptionally difficult to truly comprehend, poorly established and messily depicted. Hoard puts everything on the page, and then the screen, seemingly without stopping for a moment to consider how to streamline its mass of ideas with a coherency to convey the message it wants.
Contemplating the repressed childhood trauma that comes to a climax after the time jumps, Hoard tries to catch you up to speed with Maria's life, but there's so much unexplored in that missing period crucial to comprehending the present. Maria and Michael's (Joseph Quinn) relationship is one of the most troublesome aspects of this, a deeply uncomfortable brothers-or-lovers-like arc that should surely not be nearly as icky as it is presented. Yes, disgust is an important place from which Hoard is narrative and thematically developed, but while it is captured through a surprisingly open and sympathetic lens in the first instance, it's quickly lost and descends into something rather unstomachable.
Hoard's themes of grief, loneliness and trauma are lost on no one, but the film itself is led astray into a pandora's box of visuals designed to repulse an audience, and characters they cannot begin to understand due to such alienating behaviours and relationships with each other. Films like this, particularly those exploring coming-of-age themes with such vehemence, are strongest when seeped in empathy and understanding - but with Hoard, audiences cannot begin to process a character they cannot understand; it's almost as if Carmoon is acquainted with Maria on a level she expects the audience to instantly be, and it's not the case. Instead, it acknowledges her trauma but struggles to resonate with a character who becomes more emotionally impenetrable as the film progresses. Hoard's intention to disgust ultimately strands an audience with an overflowing pile of hostility, messy ideas and fathomless characters.