THE STORY – When novelist Ohm Bauman retreats to a remote inn to scatter his parents’ ashes, he is consumed by tales of a witch haunting the honeymoon suite. Disturbing visions and a shocking disappearance forces him to confront dark corners of his past.
THE CAST – Adam Scott, Peter Coonan, David Wilmot, Florence Ordesh, Will O’Connell, Michael Patric, Siox C, Brendan Conroy, Austin Amelio & Ezra Carlisle
THE TEAM – Damian McCarthy (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 101 Minutes
Cult Irish auteur Damian McCarthy’s “Hokum” opens with a striking, unexpected image: A conquistador wandering through a desert, following a map in a bottle. It turns out to be the epilogue to the novel Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) is writing, the last in a trilogy. It’s also clearly a metaphor for where Ohm is in his life, wandering through a desert trying to get to some ill-defined point on a hard-to-read map. Haunted by his past, Ohm takes action: He takes his parents’ ashes to the Inn in Ireland where they spent their honeymoon, planning to scatter them in a place where they were happy. Ohm’s mother was shot and killed when he was very young, and his father became abusive and drank himself into an early grave. Ohm has clearly never fully dealt with this trauma, funneling that existential pain into his brutally downbeat novels and dickish personality.
Hoping to see another glimpse of where his parents had happy memories, Ohm asks to see the hotel’s honeymoon suite, but learns that the Inn’s owner keeps it locked. Staff member Fiona (Florence Ordesh) tells Ohm that the owner supposedly trapped a witch in there who now haunts the room, but she wants to see for herself. When Fiona later goes missing, Ohm demands to look for her in the Honeymoon Suite and gets locked in. He may have called the tale of the witch pure hokum, but before this night is done, Ohm Bauman will meet that hokum face to face.
As in his previous features, “Oddity” and “Caveat,” McCarthy fills “Hokum” with immaculate occult vibes. Colm Hogan’s cinematography gets the most it can out of the inky black shadows that dominate the film, as well as the soft oranges and yellows of the Inn’s old-fashioned lighting. McCarthy and Hogan use every trick at their disposal to keep the audience off-balance, from barely visible figures and far-away faces to masterfully timed up-close jump scares. The next scare could be anything coming from anywhere in the frame, putting the audience in a near-constant state of anxiety that heightens every faint sound and faraway flicker of light. The soundtrack of unintelligible whispers and creaking wood, augmented by Joseph Bishara’s score of nearly inhuman wails and clangs, fills the entire space with spine-tingling dread, even though it sometimes relies on simply being loud to get the audience to jump or cover their eyes.
Masterful work, especially when paired with the fantastic production design. The Bilberry Woods Inn should be remembered as one of cinema’s iconic haunted houses, right alongside The Overlook Hotel and Hill House. The dim lights and wood-carved decorations give it an almost otherworldly feeling, as if it belongs to another place and time. The honeymoon suite itself, sealed off for years, takes things even further with its musty old furniture, hazy lighting, and hidden doors. When an ancient-looking dumbwaiter is revealed, it feels like a gateway to another realm, and sure enough, the basement it leads to has all the makings of a portal to hell.
McCarthy’s confidence as a director isn’t quite matched by his confidence as a screenwriter here. While the patient, slow-burning storytelling of his previous films is still present, and he allows Scott to carry long stretches of the film without any dialogue, the story’s emotional core mostly feels too fuzzy. “Hokum” essentially has two engines driving it: Ohm’s childhood tragedy and Fiona’s disappearance, with the former driving the character and the latter the plot. The connection between them is tenuous, though, and the film’s emotional climax doesn’t hit as hard as it could because Ohm’s backstory feels a bit sketchy.
Told in pieces across the film’s well-paced 101 minutes, McCarthy gradually brings the truth of Ohm’s past to light in a way that should work but ultimately feels like a failure of nerve, spelling out what happened in no uncertain terms even though it’s not necessary for anyone paying close attention. The bigger problem, though, is that the majority of the film is so plot-focused that Ohm’s character arc fades away for long stretches, meaning that when the emotional climax hits, it doesn’t feel like something the film has actively been working towards, and thus feels a bit arbitrary, despite Scott’s well-modulated, engaging performance.
As a ghost story, though, “Hokum” doesn’t put a foot wrong. The film has the hushed, intimate quality of a good campfire ghost story, setting it up with both the opening scene and a monologue from the Inn’s owner, telling a couple of scared kids the story of the witch who lived in the woods and preyed on the lost, dragging them on a tour of the underworld from which they would not return the same, if they returned at all. Augmented by a diorama filled with creepy carvings of screaming children, the scene introduces Bilberry Woods as a storybook location, populated with individuals who feel all too real in their human foibles. Both natural and supernatural forces are at work here, and McCarthy mixes them together in an intoxicating cocktail of horror. While it may be indebted to more modern storytelling methods than his previous features, “Hokum” still possesses enough of McCarthy’s dark magic that it will hold you in a vice grip all the way through. Considering how played-out many horror films feel nowadays, McCarthy’s mastery at scaring the audience is cause for celebration.
