Hokum is the terrifying new horror movie starring Adam Scott as a famous writer who goes to Ireland to settle the affairs of his deceased parents, only to find himself caught up in monsters from Irish folklore and more.
The film stars Adam Scott as Ohm Bauman, an American writer and a person of disagreeable temperament. Scott is very much the central character, but alongside him we have the various hotel staff – Cob (Brendan Conroy), owner of the hotel, Cob’s son-in-law and front desk clerk Mal (Peter Coonan), the serious and sometimes aggressive groundskeeper Fergal (Michael Patric), bellhop Alby (Will O’Connell) and happy, helpful Fiona (Florence Ordesh). There is also the local woods-based hermit who creates magic mushroom-infused milk drinks and is generally odd.
The film is written and directed by Damian McCarthy, a filmmaker best known for 2020’s Caveat and 2024’s Oddity, two well-received horror movies.
Ohm Bauman travels to the isolated Bilberry Woods Hotel in Ireland, a picturesque location and a place his parents had visited and often said they always wished to return to. With both his parents now dead, Ohm plans to scatter their ashes in the woods and also finish his latest book. The hotel is festooned with monuments to Irish folklore, from odd carved figures to a slightly scary old man telling children very unsettling ghost stories. In short order, several bad things happen, including a suspicious disappearance, which quickly leads to Ohm and others thinking about the mysterious Honeymoon Suite, which is never used for guests and seemingly never even entered. A heavy metal gate is kept locked at all times. There are many stories that the honeymoon suite is haunted.
The film is one of the best examples of a horror movie, where it is never clear how much is supernatural evil and how much is simply in the minds of those experiencing it. We see things from Ohm’s perspective, and in a number of ways, he is an unreliable narrator. First of all, Ohm is a writer, a protagonist writer is almost certainly a sign that we’re not seeing what “really” happened, then Ohm has a lot of trauma that he is dealing with that is connected to this very hotel, and also, there are a lot of hallucinogens flying around.
For consistently playing the nicest characters on TV, Scott is a very good jerk writer, and despite the things that happen to him in the film and his past, it’s often hard to feel too sorry for Ohm. The hotel staff occupy the curious place of many tourist areas; their livelihoods depend on tourism, but they also resent the tourists, especially when they’re as rude as Ohm. Mal is the obsequious desk clerk, Fergal, whose duties include shooting goats with a crossbow, Alby, the helpful if timid bellhop who tries to talk to Ohm and quickly regrets it and Fiona, the cool bartender with an interest in Irish folklore and, naturally, the potentially haunted honeymoon suite.
McCarthy is very good at creating tension and has an amazing use of the space of the hotel to make it scarier. There are very few locations in the film, with most scenes taking place in the hotel or the surrounding woods, and we actually see very little of the hotel, just the few key locations and the vague impression of its hard to find your way around if you don’t know the building well. He also manages to be very creative with one of the mainstays of horror cinema – the jump-scare, with often the reveal of the “scare” just being slipped in almost unnoticed.
The film sometimes suffers from there not being an adequate opposite character to Ohm, and even with the monsters, there are several different entities presented at various times, diffusing the impact somewhat. The film also sometimes strains credulity in what actions people would take, all supernatural events aside, leading to some scenes where you can’t help but think that no one would do that. But overall, the film is a great horror movie and will only further add to McCarthy’s reputation as an excellent horror director.
(4 / 5)
