After attempting to take his own life in one of its rooms, antisocial novelist Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) returns to the grounds of a supposedly haunted hotel hoping to make amends. Discovering a suitably bleak conspiracy, he’s at risk of crossing over to the other side himself when he’s locked in the nightmarish honeymoon suite where an ancient witch supposedly resides. A load of old hokum? Ohm is about to find out firsthand that sometimes things do go bump in the night.
The latest one-word feature from Damien Mc Carthy, Hokum is another cinematic oddity from the Irish writer-director. One caveat: Scott’s jerkass novelist starts out so thoroughly unpleasant that some might struggle to get past the film’s first half hour. To be sure, let him die in there!
When he returns to the remote Irish guesthouse, Ohm is alarmed to hear that hotel employee Fiona (Florence Ordesh) has disappeared. Blaming himself (she did walk in on his dangling body, after all), he lets himself into the honeymoon suite in search of answers. There, he’s confronted by ghosts both physical and metaphorical, and forced to reckon with manifestations of his own childhood trauma. Set in an isolated hotel during off-season and featuring a troubled writer in a haunted room, it’s a cross between Stephen King’s The Shining and Room 1408. There’s even a Pennywise figure in the rabbit-eared weirdo glimpsed in the film’s most unsettling scenes.
Well-trodden setup aside, Hokum takes an unexpected approach to the supernatural horror story. There’s plenty of black humour to be found within the hotel’s walls, but Mc Carthy largely plays the scares straight, setting Scott’s Ohm on a well-oiled rollercoaster of efficiently delivered scares. Given the unenviable task of playing an absolute asshole, Scott does great work, although the screenplay does tend to overplay his misanthropy a bit too much at times.
A welcome strain of black comedy runs through Hokum’s veins, making its segues into outright terror hit even harder. Its jump scares are too telegraphed in advance to land as they should, but its bizarro imagery keeps the blood nicely chilled.
HOKUM is out in UK cinemas now.
