Saura Lightfoot-Leon stars as a traumatised, rubbish-fixated teen in British director Luna Carmoon’s admirable, if hard-going debut

There are certain films – Michael Haneke’s original version of Funny Games is one, Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi’s The Tribe another – that I acknowledge as singular, visionary works of art, but which I never, ever want to watch again. Hoard, Luna Carmoon’s profoundly uncomfortable directorial debut, fits this category. It isn’t harrowing in the same way as the other works mentioned. But 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.

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.

In UK and Irish cinemas now