Rating 7/10
Hokum? I hardly know’ em! Thankfully, director Damian McCarthy’s latest is far more effective than its goofy title suggests.
The Irish filmmaker has built a reputation with the claustrophobic Caveat and the supernatural Oddity. The title of his third feature practically hands critics a free pass to dismiss it as a pile of nonsense. Except it is not. Beneath the knowingly pulpy title is a nifty little ghost story packed with creeping atmosphere and a handful of genuine frights.
Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) is an American fantasy author who travels to a remote hotel in rural Ireland. He’s there to scatter his parents’ ashes and finish the final chapter of his bestselling Conquistador trilogy. Ohm is an abrasive personality. Okay, let’s face it. The guy is a jerk. He quickly clashes with the eccentric staff. However, he forms a connection with the bartender Fiona (Florence Ordesh). One night at the bar, Fiona and the bellhop Alby (Will O’Connell) tell Ohm about the sealed-off honeymoon suite. The space is rumored to be haunted by a witch supposedly trapped there years earlier by the hotel’s owner, Cob (Brendan Conroy).
Deeply buried childhood trauma surrounding his mother’s death begins to overwhelm him. Ohm suffers a psychological breakdown that lands him in the hospital. When he eventually returns to the inn weeks later, he discovers Fiona has mysteriously vanished and that a strange local drifter named Jerry (David Wilmot) is being blamed for her disappearance. Convinced the answers may lie inside the infamous honeymoon suite, Ohm and Jerry break back into the hotel, which is now closed for the season. They want to investigate for themselves.
What I appreciate most about this account is its utter simplicity. Damian McCarthy’s screenplay embraces a tale with a bare bones plot: a spooky establishment, a witch, and the slow accumulation of dread. Because the narrative is not bogged down by convoluted exposition, the film can focus almost entirely on carefully constructed shocks. Fear can be visual. Remember the infamous closet reveal of the daughter’s distorted face in The Ring, or the sudden red-faced demon appearance behind Patrick Wilson in Insidious? Yes, these are jump scares. Creatively staged disruptions of visual expectation can be potent. In this saga, darkness and silence work in tandem to place the viewer in a state of anxiety. The jolts feel earned. The integration of Irish folklore adds to a creepy atmosphere.
Sometimes horror works best when it simply focuses on being scary. Hokum creates an unsettling mood using the simple framework of a haunted house. One of the film’s lingering images involves Ohm’s vision of Jack the Jackass. A sinister-looking children’s TV host appears to him while on a bad mushroom trip. The personality is a nightmare of warped nostalgia and repressed trauma. The character is never explained, which makes the experience all the more bizarre. I wouldn’t be surprised if he gradually achieved a cult following like “Frank the Rabbit” in Donnie Darko. That’s one surreal experience out of many. Hokum reclaims the word by fully embracing what it is, a bit of ghost-story silliness that becomes something profoundly unnerving.
05-05-26
2 Responses
Excellent review Mark! I loved Hokum and it sounds like you enjoyed it as well. Damian McCarthy is quickly becoming one of my favorite directors. I know there’s only the three films so far, but his movies keep getting better with each release. Not to mention how he brings something from the previous film into the next one. The little drummer bunny from Caveat brought into Oddity, and the bellboy brought into Hokum. Looking forward to seeing what turns up in the next one. This had all the things I love in a spooky movie. It had the dark eerie moments that make you focus really hard on the corners of the screen and in the shadows to see what might appear. This is really the kind of movie I love to watch during the Halloween season in a dark room. I can’t wait for Damien’s next project.
Thanks, Rochelle! I loved it too. Excellent point about McCarthy carrying something from one movie into the next. I’m also curious what Hokum will contribute to the next one. What I especially like about him is that he trusts atmosphere and imagery to do the work. Hokum is an old-fashioned witch-and-haunted-house story, but he gets so much mileage out of a creeping sense that something is just slightly off. Sometimes horror gets buried under mythology and explanations. McCarthy seems perfectly happy just giving us a nightmare.