I remember reading a post about Hokum last year and people were going wild for this one with Damian McCarthy directing after hits like Caveat and Oddity, love those too. I was already paying attention to it specially when they trow Adam Scoot into it, but not everything is pink and rainbows on this story, its not bad but its not an 8/10, it drags a lot and the witch didnt generate enough chaos, it was more like a executioner instead of the one harrasing characters. McCarthy has been quietly building this reputation as one of the most interesting directors in Irish horror and Hokum feels like the moment where everything he has been practicing with his smaller work finally clicks into something really sharp and confident. You are immediately dropped into the life of Ohm Bauman, this American novelist played by Scott, who is just about the most unpleasant man you could imagine sharing a hotel lobby with, I hated the guy the moment he start opening his mouth and I mean that as a real compliment to both the writing and the performance. He shows up at this small hotel tucked away somewhere in Ireland, to scatter the ashes of his dead parents near a massive redwood tree in the surrounding woods and from the literal second he steps through the front door he treats every single person around him like they are furniture and like everyone owes him. He will not sign a book for the guy checking him in, he looks over the shoulder at the staff, he drinks heavily and the guy is cold AF when a bellboy named Alby excitedly asks him to look at his manuscript, Ohm heats up a spoon over a candle and burns the poor guy on the hand just to get him to leave. That tells you everything you need to know about who this person is in about 15 minutes flat into the story and the movie earns enormous credit for making you sit with someone this toxic without ever walking away from it, honestly even during the moments it drag I never felt like fast forward or looking at something else, reason why I think its not so bad.
- IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt35672862/
- Platform: PRIME VIDEO
McCarthy is great at is building dread through very specific physical details and practical problem solving and Hokum is probably the cleanest version of that skill he has shown so far. The whole story at the Bilberry Woods Hotel is so well constructed, you have got the wheelchair bound owner Cob who casually mentions he once trapped a witch inside the locked honeymoon suite upstairs, you have got Fergal who is weird and suspicious, and then there is Mal, the front desk clerk who also happens to be Cob son in law so from the start the entire hotel is fishy, also Mal carries this nervous energy. There is also this guy Jerry, living out of a van in the woods and drinking goat milk mix with mushrooms that gets him high as kite wanting to look at his own reflection, but still seems like the only person Ohm treats with a little bit of respect, he is just totally different with this guy than the rest of the guys at the hotel and then the bartender Fiona, who ends up being the moral center of the whole thing because she is the one who actually saves Ohm when things get really dark. When Fiona goes missing around a Halloween party, Ohm feels responsible in a way that clearly cuts through all of this armor he is suppose to wear as protection against the world because thats how I see him, he is hurting and he just push people away to sink into his guilt and watching Adam Scott carry that guilt while also staying completely in character as this prick difficult man is some of the best work he has done. He never softens Ohm into someone easier to root for and yet somehow you are rooting for him anyway, which is not easy to pull off and I think people are going to underrate how good he is in this thing. The honeymoon suite itself is pretty good for a horror location although once he hits te bed everything changes it just becomes another room, rotting and untouched and absolutely disgusting in every corner, the sequence involving a small elevator hidden in the wall, a clock with a mechanical boy swinging a golf club and a very dark basement below is the kind of stuff that makes you lean forward because the movie creates a lot of tension by trying to manage time, the time it took the golf club boy to hit the button.
Now we come to the more realisc part of this blog post because the movie is not perfect and the section right in the middle where Ohm is recovering in the hospital after his lowest point drags hard and takes a lot from how this story started, this moment came out of no where, he decides to take his own life without much explanation, yes the movie shows he is hurting for his mother but at this point the movie has not reveal he was the one who accidentally shot his mom. The subplot involving Jerry and his backstory also gets a little confusing when the movie is trying to juggle it alongside everything else happening at the hotel, because there are a few situations where I lost the thread of what the movie wanted me to feel about him versus what I was actually feeling. The pacing in that part of the movie feels all over the place, like McCarthy knew exactly where he needed the story to go but was not quite sure how long to let certain scenes breathe before getting there, and for a movie that is this tight and controlled, those moments stand out more than they probably would in a messier movie, I mean this movie was very messy in that sense, where we dont know why Ohm hang himself, then was his mother trying to torment him or help him? its like all this questions are getting answer towards the end but at the same time during this moments turn the movie very confusing. The dream sequences involving Ohm traumatic childhood are doing a lot of heavy lifting in terms of explaining who he is and why he is so damaged, and while they are unsettling, especially the part involving this nightmare childrens television character named Jack the Jackass who looks like a very bizzar version of Bugs Bunny, I think one or two of those sequences could have been trimmed and the movie would still stand the same, I really though they were going to give more screen time to Jack considering it was shown through the trailers. The entire time felt like the movie was clearly holding something back for reasons that feel more structural than dramatic, like you can sense the chess pieces being moved rather than just watching things happen, but these are complaints I am making about a movie I enjoy, so take them for what they are worth, if you have gotten to this point you might be asking if I like the movie at all? the answer is yes.
Hokum really remind me of previous movies I have seen from McCarthy, for example Caveat which was an extremely contained physical space and he use it to generate almost unbearable tension through mechanical logic rather than cheap audio tricks. McCarthy is not interested in making you jump by throwing a loud noise at you, I think on Hokum this is very clear during the honeymoon room shots with Ohm, he is interested in making you sweat because you understand exactly how the trap works and you can see every possible way it could go wrong and the elevator sequence is the clearest expression of that. The clock trick, the chalk circle, the sound design as the witch moves through the dark clanking those shackles, all of it is constructed with this almost puzzle like precision that makes the horror feel earned building the atmosphere, its the classic saying of "painting the picture". Compared to Oddity, which I thought had tremendous atmosphere but sometimes let its interesting ideas run a little longer than they needed to not knowing when it was just enough and even felt like going in circles. Hokum is more disciplined and more satisfying as a complete experience if you put the dots together from start to finish, it feels like he learned the right lessons from that movie and applied them here. My biggest complain about the movie is the witch backstory where there is close to none, very little context to the witch story, but I wonder if there is a deeper meaning to it like on other movies, a clear example is Smile where the demon is menthal illness specifically the way Ohm relationship with his own guilt and the ghost of what happened with his parents keeps comming up with those disturbing visions, gives the movie a weight that feels satisfying but you have to think a bit much about it for it to work. That combination of craft and actual feeling is rare and I do not think enough people are going to give this one the credit it deserves.
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