Conjuring a haunting story of grief, mystery, and lore, Damian McCarthy’s “Hokum” is a witch’s brew of perfect ingredients to terrify audiences. Packed with creepy stories, unnerving imagery, and jump scares aplenty, “Hokum” is the real deal, one whose surprising originality breathes new life into a genre at risk of repeating itself too often. It’s safe to say “Hokum” may be an early frontrunner for best horror film of the year.
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In “Hokum,” Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) –a character that wouldn’t be out of place in a Stephen King book – is a writer looking to spread his parents’ ashes in the place he imagines they would have been happy, a modest old hotel in the Irish countryside where they spent their honeymoon. He’s a depressed and curmudgeonly soul, frustrated by the slightest inconvenience and even cruel to a fan, an eager bellhop named Alby (Will O’Connell). After he’s rescued from a suicide attempt at the hotel, he returns to thank his rescuer, Fiona (Florence Ordesh), only to learn she’s gone missing from a flustered front desk clerk, Mal (Peter Coonan), who’s closing the hotel up for the season. Convinced by Jerry (David Wilmot), a local who befriended Fiona, to check out the hotel one last time, Ohm follows an unsettled feeling to the Hotel’s locked honeymoon suite that’s said to be haunted by a witch to search for the truth.
On the surface, a spooky story about a haunted hotel doesn’t sound particularly inviting, nor does the idea that a witch would only choose one room in the Hotel to haunt, but what McCarthy accomplishes here feels like a thrill ride—no moment left to waste, no minute spared from tension. Like his previous film, “Oddity,” he knows how to play on the audience’s fear of the dark, isolating every bump in the night so it sounds threatening and adding shadowy figures only the audience can see. Reconnecting with “Oddity” cinematographer Colm Hogan, McCarthy sometimes plunges the film and the audience into near total darkness until the only thing on screen peering out of the inky abyss is a frightening face. “Hokum” leans heavily on music to emphasize the moments of terror, channeling classic horror movies like Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” which, like “Hokum,” also takes place at a hotel closed for the season. Since “Hokum” stays mostly in the same setting, the movie is rich in visual style and production design, right down to the layers of dust in the abandoned room. When McCarthy uses rabbits as a visual motif that only Ohm can see, it channels the visions of “Donnie Darko” or even “Harvey,” both of which feature male characters alone in their visions. In “Hokum,” there is both a good rabbit that’s helping Ohm on what’s coming and a terrifying one that punctures his dreams from a nightmarish kid’s TV show, and he must survive both if he wants to make it to dawn.
McCarthy, who also wrote the screenplay, doesn’t overexplain things or spoil his own story. Instead, viewers ride through every twist and turn, learning more about the Hotel’s history and the secrets it holds. The script cleverly uses the various parts of the setting to their full potential; even dead ends and locked cabinets serve their purpose. At times, it can look like the Hotel turns into a bit of a funhouse, full of ominous props meant to make the audience leap from their seat if the split-second jump scares don’t spook them first. McCarthy also layers a story within the series’ plot, in which Ohm struggles to end it, following a conquistador and a child servant as they wander a desert in search of treasure. The cruelty in that chapter, which Fiona scoffs she won’t read if it ends like that, reflects Ohm’s worldview that only seems to grow colder until he falls into this mystery.
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At first, Ohm is a difficult character to warm up to, but the longer he spends in the haunted honeymoon suite, the more it’s apparent his guilt has driven him away from people and into his stories. Scott is a natural at playing both sides of this conflicted character, starting the movie with a casual superiority complex that is humbled throughout the evening as his past reveals itself. His reactions aren’t overblown, but more subdued, except that his panic-stricken eyes lose their cockiness in moments of desperation.
“Hokum” feels like a throwback to classic horror movies, where the gore is minimal but the mental frights are plentiful. Scott’s role as an embittered writer-turned-investigator is fascinating to watch and feels in line with James Caan’s performance in “Misery.” What could have easily been an overstuffed confluence of ideas – a haunted house, a ghost, a witch, a murder, oh my! – comes together so effectively because of McCarthy’s masterful command of what scares audiences. [A]
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