Hokum

When a heavy-drinking novelist turns up at a remote hotel that is about to close up for the season in Hokum, we can assume it will not be long for the jump-scares to kick in. But in this supernatural folk horror, screening at the International Film Festival Mannheim-Heidelberg in Germany after its premiere at Austin’s South by Southwest, Irish director Damian McCarthy manages to invigorate a familiar genre premise with black-humoured, eccentric charm. McCarthy also made the horrors Caveat (2020) and Oddity (2022), and should do similarly well with midnight movie fans looking for a sharp-witted rollick into the dark side of the mind, even if this maximalist mash of ghosts, witches and killers feels tends toward the chaotic and convoluted.

Adam Scott carries the film’s more idiosyncratic edges as Ohn Bauman, an unusually abrasive, misanthropic lead. A writer of popular, serialised conquistador books (fantastical, desert-set scenes from one of these bookend the action), he has travelled to Ireland for a week-long getaway, driving through its moody, emerald landscape to visit the hotel where his parents honeymooned, before his mother was shot shortly afterwards, and his father drank himself to death.

Bauman’s books have bleak endings and he views the world through the same lens, insulting bellboy and aspiring writer Alba (Will O’Connell) and making sure his room is as far away as possible from the upcoming Halloween party. He’s come to scatter his parent’s ashes near the giant redwood tree in a photo he carries around. But on a boozy first evening getting to know hotel bartender Fiona (Florence Ordesh), a sympathetic soul who reminds him of his mother, he spirals grimly off-course, sending the hotel into crisis mode. When Fiona disappears under mysterious circumstances soon after, he sees a chance to make amends, and determines to find her.

The hotel has an antiquated system of keys, bells and elevators and, with its dim lamplight and winding red corridors, a mustily elegant, old-world sense of timelessness that’s effective in setting the mood. It is smaller and quainter than the Overlook Hotel where Kubrick’s alcoholic writer holed up off-season in The Shining, but just as imprinted with terrible histories, it will emerge, as bodies and beings in its depths refuse to stay hidden behind locked doors.

There is a local folktale about a witch who lives in a stone hut in the woods and steals lost travellers away to the underworld, which is told to kids as a spooky story by the owner (Brendan Conroy). It’s from this legend the film’s supernatural layer erupts. But the hotel’s staff and regulars are just as suspicious, from a suspected wife-murderer always on magic mushrooms who lives in a nearby van (David Wilmot), to a scheming manager and drink-spiker with a sex-related secret (Peter Coonan). As the shocking, macabre details of Ohn’s tragic family past gradually emerge, a theme around accidents and intentional violence develops, and saving others as atonement. The film remains very tangled in ornate ideas to the last — a victimised guest in this jumble needs to find out about chalk-circles for warding off folk creatures, while also navigating Ireland’s troubled history of suppressed pregnancies — but its twists are creepy, entertaining and smart throughout.

McCarthy taps all the tricks of the haunted-house frightener, from spectral figures in backgrounds to creaking, knocking, whispers and a staticky television that turns itself on, to scary if routine effect. Hokum’s plot anchors in real-world horror, from suicide to gendered violence, skew very dark but add a deeper, more thoughtful layer, and McCarthy’s generosity of spirit toward flawed humans and light delight in the weirder side of life (a goat on a shroom trip on a car bonnet, entranced by its own reflection, is par for the course here), soften the edges with warm quirk and heart.

Director, writer: Damian McCarthy
Editor: Brian Philip Davis
Cinematographer: Colm Hoga
Producers: Roy Lee, Steven Schneider, Derek Dauchy, Ruth Treacy, Julianne Ford, Mairtín de Barra
Cast: Adam Scott, Peter Coonan, David Wilmot, Florence Ordesh, Will O’Connell, Brendan Conroy, Michael Patric
Music: Joseph Bishara
Sound design: Steve Fanagan
Production companies: Image Nation Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates), Spooky Pictures (United States), Tailored Films (Ireland), Cweature Features (United States)
Sales: Neon
Venue: Mannheim-Heidelberg
In English
101 minutes