“Hokum” doesn’t begin how you might expect a horror film set at a remote Irish hotel to begin. Instead, it starts in a sandy desert, with two parched and sunburned travelers making their way over the windswept dunes.
We quickly learn that this is the setting for our main character, Ohm Bauman’s (Adam Scott) new novel – the final installment in his “Conquistador Trilogy.” The opening sequence of Damian McCarthy’s new film cuts back and forth between the action at the end of Ohm’s novel and a firsthand view of Ohm’s writing process – which mainly involves lots of satisfied smirks and sips of whiskey.
Without almost any dialogue, the opening of “Hokum” tells us everything we need to know about Ohm. He nurses that whiskey until its completion, clacking away at his keyboard with the speed of a man who has never known writer’s block. Those aforementioned smirks give you the sense that he’s a bit full of himself (this will become even more apparent later on), and the three words he ends his novel with perfectly sum up his worldview: “We are doomed.”
We also learn he’s being haunted by the ghostly specter of a woman. But we’ll get to that later.
“Hokum” is McCarthy’s follow-up to 2024’s aptly titled “Oddity,” continuing his streak of movies that fundamentally understand that human terror is always scarier than the supernatural. And yet, he never underestimates the power of a good, old-fashioned, cackling witch who lives in a dank, dark cellar. The emotional beats of “Hokum” – the ways in which it tries to reckon with guilt over old wounds – are well-positioned within the story, but not quite as fleshed out as they need to be to pack that emotional gut punch. But where McCarthy excels is creating truly horrifying moments out of man and myth alike.
We quickly move away from the sands of the desert and follow Ohm to Ireland. His parents died years ago (his mother was murdered, he tells the pretty hotel bartender bitterly, sending his father into a monstrous spiral), and he’s returned to the hotel where they spent their honeymoon to finally scatter their ashes and bury that horse once and for all. But Ohm’s plans are sent into a tailspin when that pretty hotel bartender, Fiona (Florence Ordesh), goes missing.
A potent combination of childhood trauma and indisputable literary success has turned Ohm into a bit of an asshole, a character trait that becomes clearer with every sarcastic word that escapes his mouth. When he’s short with the hotel manager, Mal (Peter Coonan), it’s easy to write off his rudeness as tiredness – he’s had a long flight. But when he later scoffs at a well-meaning bellboy’s (Will O’Connell) assertion that he too is a writer, and then purposefully burns the man to make him go away, it’s a little harder to make excuses. His parting description of the bellboy is even worse: “An oblivious charisma vacuum, completely incapable of reading a room.”
As we come to find out, Ohm might as well be describing himself (this audio is replayed at a rather key moment later on, a little taste of McCarthy’s ability to combine humor and darkness). We also learn that there’s another reason for his harshness, one that is discovered by Fiona before she disappears (and one that I would be remiss to spoil). That connection between the two of them spurs Ohm into action, intent on finding her as if that will absolve him of all his past actions. No one knows where Fiona is, but the one place no one has checked is the honeymoon suite – the honeymoon suite the hotel owner has blocked off because it allegedly leads to the lair of a witch. And, there’s still the matter of that ghostly woman who Ohm sees around every corner.
Whenever any filmmaker makes a haunted hotel movie, “The Shining” comparisons are unavoidable. There are certainly explorations of both the evils of men and of those beyond our control that feel apt for that comparison. But McCarthy’s sensibilities are different enough from Kubrick’s that “Hokum” feels a piece of its own. There is, for lack of a better term, a little bit of a “little stinker” sensibility about McCarthy’s films that makes them, for as scary as they can be, oddly delightful. Ohm spends a large chunk of the film stuck in that honeymoon suite, fighting with psychological and supernatural horrors alike – one of them in the form of a cherubic statue that has a twisted sense of humor, and one of them – the main event, you might say – in the form of screeching, cackling witch.
The witch sequence is probably the film’s pièce de résistance, the witch (Sioux Carroll) toying with Ohm as a deranged cat would with a mouse. Scott is more than believable as a depressed jerk, but the strength in his performance really lies in these moments. He’s not an actor we’re used to seeing play terrified, and he doesn’t overplay it. There’s a tension to him in these moments, an intensity to his fear that almost paralyzes him – eyes wide, mouth taut, ready to snap as he waits for what’s around the corner.
But the witch – as terrifying as she is – cannot compare with the real life horror of what has happened to Fiona, or what Ohm has experienced in his own life. The culmination of the latter does not quite land emotionally, perhaps a little too rushed and leaving the audience with more questions than answers. But smartly, McCarthy does not try to connect the supernatural evils with the human ones with a thinly drawn metaphor. They exist in separate planes, connected instead by a question of perspective. There are forces of evil beyond our control, but there are also more mundane, human forms of evil at play – and those are the ones we are far more likely to come into contact with. The question becomes whether or not we succumb to them, or drag ourselves out of that hole.
“Hokum” opens in theaters this weekend.
