Hoard (2024)

The young "Maria" (Lily-Beau Leach) lives with her loving mum (Hayley Squires) in an home full to the brim of junk. Some of it just bric-a-brac, some of it more distasteful and unhealthy, but the pair rub along well enough scavenging their way through skips and bins. "Maria" has a tough time at school and doesn't really fit in, so when an accident at home sees her put into foster care, she has quite a bit of adjusting to do under the care of the savvy "Michelle" (Samantha Spiro). Now we scoot forward to her late teens where she (now Saura Lightfoot-Leon) is still living with "Michelle" and seemingly quite a content. One morning it's announced that "Michael" (Joseph Quinn), who was a former charge, is coming to stay for a while whilst his housing is sorted out. He's a decent cove with a girlfriend expecting a baby. Almost immediately he arrives, the two click. Not quite in any conventional sense, but there does seem to be something between them, and understanding. It's this that starts "Maria" thinking of her past, pining for it even - especially when a delivery man presents her with something entirely unexpected in a small package! With the two of them living increasingly closely, how might their relationship develop? Now this isn't for the squeamish. Right from the start we experience the rather sticky downsides of their quite grubby way of life, and as the story moves to it's second phase it becomes a potent, if shallow, character study of two people that just don't conform. The problem for me here is that the drama goes nowhere. It's a sequence of observations of the life of a woman that I didn't feel I knew on any level at all. Her behaviour is unsettling but it seemed to me that was so that the audience could feel unsettled, squirm in our chairs a bit, rather than because the character of "Maria" was evolving in any way. Indeed she seems to retrogress as the film just becomes increasingly tasteless and contrived. It's rare to see people leave an arthouse cinema mid-film, but they did during this. I didn't, but I am not at all sure what the point was, or to whom this is aimed. It has it's moments and at times is really visceral, but sorry - by the end I found it all just a bit too introspective and dull.