We are used to seeing the excellent Adam Scott (Severance, Parks and Recreation) in likeable nice guy roles. In Hokum, however, he plays a curmudgeonly and prickly bestselling novelist called Ohm Bauman. Deliberating over the ending to his series of popular novels, Bauman has decided to take a trip to the rural Irish inn where his parents stayed on their honeymoon, to scatter their ashes.
The remote Bilberry Woods Hotel in the off-season is a fantastically eerie horror location. Irish writer and director Damian McCarthy populates the hotel and its surroundings with excellent, likably eccentric locals who recount the spooky lore of the area to the sceptical writer.
Jerry (David Wilmot) lives in the woods, tinkers with moonshine and psychedelics and says he sees ghosts. Bellboy Alby (Will O’Connell) is a starstruck wannabe author treated with disdain by his hero. Fiona (Florence Ordesh) is the bartender whose disappearance motivates Bauman’s exploration of the twisty hotel and its grounds.
“Hokum,” says Bauman dismissively when he is told about the witch who supposedly haunts the honeymoon suite where his parents stayed. The film performs the neat trick of making us warm to this horribly flawed and unlikeable character as he is inevitably proven wrong.
A film with a fiction writer protagonist set in a haunted hotel inevitably suggests the influence of Stephen King, not just via The Shining but the short story 1408, made into a memorable film starring John Cusack in 2007. That story similarly features a sceptical writer staying in a supposedly haunted guest house who, like Hokum’s Bauman, experiences disturbing visions from his past. Hokum also recalls horror impresario Ti West’s brilliantly eerie New England-set The Innkeepers (2011), with which this film shares the atmosphere of an off-season haunted guesthouse.
Hokum is, at its core, a classic ghost story in the mode of English writer MR James. But it throws a lot of extra horror elements into the pot at the risk of becoming unwieldy and bloated.
McCarthy’s ambiguous film has a witch, a ghost or two, a missing woman, flashbacks of Bauman’s traumatic past and, in the weirdest and scariest scene, a nightmarish televised vision of a half-bunny, half-person creature. With so much in the mix, this could be a formless mess, so it is surprising that Hokum holds together as well as it does. With one or two stumbles where things get a touch convoluted, this is an enormously effective, well-crafted and proudly old-fashioned gothic chiller.
With a focus on character and mood, Hokum is an intelligent and, by the end, emotionally satisfying film. The strength of the film is not in its originality but in the execution of familiar conventions and plot points. How much you will enjoy the film depends on your tolerance and enthusiasm for old fashioned jump scares. An overused device in modern horror that can signal a sub-par film, it is hard here not to admire McCarthy’s commitment to making his audience gasp.
McCarthy’s talent is in building the hotel’s atmosphere of mystery with carefully placed light from lamps and candles that cast long shadows before leading to controlled scares carried out with technical skill and pinpoint timing. Strongly recalling the well-executed horror trickery of the now-classic stage adaptation of Susan Hill’s novel The Woman in Black, shocks are strongly telegraphed and built towards with inevitability. The director is telling the audience clearly what’s about to happen at every turn, but the film is no less effective for it.
The film was made in West Cork, and the Irish countryside is a beautiful, eerie backdrop for the maze-like guesthouse. Nevertheless, there is little in the film’s depiction of ghosts and witches in the Irish woodland that relies on culturally specific mythology or history.
Hokum is Irish writer and director Damian McCarthy’s third horror film after the critically acclaimed low-budget ghost stories Caveat (2020) and Oddity (2024). Those first two films were shown at film festivals before being released on horror streaming channel Shudder. This is McCarthy’s first full cinema release. Each of his films is better than the last, with the filmmaker sharpening his writing and directing a little more each time. Here he is aided considerably by the consistently brilliant Adam Scott.
Hokum is a horror film made by a director working to carry out horror conventions as well as he possibly can. The film is full of tongue-in-cheek, knowing nods to the genre. It doesn’t matter that all the major late-film plot reveals are telegraphed to the audience with a nod and a wink early in the film. Hokum has fun telling you what it’s going to do well ahead of time and remains scary and entertaining regardless.
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