Hoard review – uncomfortable drama with a magnetic lead performance

Saura Lightfoot-Leon is magnetic as Maria, a teenager who has lived with a foster mother in south London for the past decade. Her birth mother (Hayley Squires), a compulsive hoarder who channelled her fierce love for her daughter into offerings of scavenged foil balls and chalk, was crushed by a falling pile of rubbish when Maria was eight. The memories had been neatly tidied away, but when she encounters former foster kid Michael (Joseph Quinn), older by 10 years but odd in the same abrasive, unsettling way that she is, Maria starts to delve into the detritus of her past. In practice, this means that she stops washing, starts collecting humming bags of rubbish and enters into a teasing semi-sexual game with Michael (shades of the malicious playfulness of Yann Samuell’s Love Me If You Dare). It’s impressive, up to a point, but having taken the character to the brink of breakdown, the film doesn’t know what to do next. The ending is rather too clean for a story about mess.