“With that attitude, you can stay lost.”
With his sophomore feature, 2024’s Oddity, writer/director Damian Mc Carthy demonstrated his talent for folklore-ish horror seeped in deep dark corridors where ancient terrors mix with the evil deeds of modern psychopaths. His third film, Hokum, continues to journey down these same haunted hallways where primordial terror once roamed freely and now those malevolent spirits conjure contemporary transgressions.
Mc Carthy replaces the sympathetic protagonist of Oddity with a thoroughly unlikable protagonist here in alcoholic author Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott). Salty, confrontational, passive aggressive, Ohm availed himself of societal pleasantries long ago and he’s a bit of a tough hang for the first half of the film. The more you get to know and understand him, though, the more you realize this is all a façade erected by a man who never wants to get close to anyone ever again.
There are undeniable shades of several Stephen King protagonists in the notion of a genius author burdened by past trauma, and this film unfolds in a very novelistic way. The way it deliberately keeps you off kilter and behind the 8-ball a bit is a feature, not a bug, and in that way feels almost like a good horror read that you’re watching. This is my diplomatic way of saying that most movies don’t give audiences the satisfaction of being deliberately confused for this long. It’s a good feeling in the confines of horror where you know there will eventually be a payoff to all the misdirection.
Endeavoring to come to a definitive conclusion to his best-selling “Conquistador” trilogy, Bauman decides it’s finally time for a change of scenery and travels to Ireland to scatter his parents’ ashes. Prickly and standoffish to everyone he meets at the rustic Inn, from the simpering desk clerk Mal (Peter Coonan) to the poor bellhop-cum-struggling writer Alby (Will O'Connell), Ohm only seems to connect with a wild man in the woods named Jerry (David Wilmot), who makes homemade magic mushroom milk and moonshine.
The only female for miles is Fiona (Florence Ordesh), a bartender at the Inn who can almost sense the deep sadness in Ohm, though even her patience has its limits. She and Alby both, however, are willing to share stories of the haunted honeymoon suite, in which the Inn’s wheelchair-bound owner Cob (Brendan Conroy) is said to have trapped a witch. To say much more about the plot would be to give too much away, but major events on back-to-back nights set the film’s true plot in motion.
Though I haven’t seen his debut feature Caveat, I can comfortably say that Mc Carthy is among the best of the current crop of horror filmmakers at utilizing darkness to chilling effect. This film exists in the deepest and darkest corners of a haunted old Inn, and Mc Carthy and cinematographer Colm Hogan excel at placing the audience in the surrounding darkness as well. If you can see this in a movie theater, take the opportunity to do so, it helps the film’s atmosphere tremendously.
Scott is excellent in the lead role, despite being a tough hang like I said earlier. That’s all part of his character arc, though, and the supporting cast around him is terrific as well, with Wilmot being the true stand-out as the madman Jerry, who is craziest on the surface, but is the only person around Ohm that seems to be telling him the truth. But the entire supporting cast is terrific, there’s not a false note played among them.
Hokum is a film that exists simultaneously in the world of ancient Irish folklore and the enduring modern horrors of man’s inhumanity to man. It’s unique in its blending of the two and quite unlike most other horror that’s out there these days. It would be great if more horror movies trusted their audience as much as Hokum does, the entire landscape of the genre would be drastically improved.
Header image via IMDb