The Irish filmmaker Damian McCarthy, in common with his genre colleague Osgood Perkins, likes to seed familiar horror setups with moments of ludicrousness that destabilize his scares and discombobulate his viewers. Very little in his movies can be taken at face value — not even their titles, which announce themselves with winking humility.
“Hokum,” McCarthy’s third and most accomplished feature, continues this tradition. Set almost exclusively in a creaky Irish hotel surrounded by woodland, this effective folk horror introduces Ohm Bauman (a perfectly cast Adam Scott), a cranky, depressed novelist and likely alcoholic. Ohm — whose name suggests a Zen-like attitude its owner clearly does not possess — is struggling to finish his trilogy on the conquistadors, and has come to the hotel where his parents once honeymooned to scatter their ashes beneath his mother’s favorite tree.
Still haunted by the violent dissolution of his family when he was a child, Ohm has little patience for the hotel’s many peculiarities. These include a gabby bellboy and aspiring writer (Will O’Connell) who will soon regret pestering Ohm for career advice; a friendly eccentric named Jerry (David Wilmot), who lives in a van in the forest happily glugging a homemade potion of magic mushrooms in goats’ milk; and a passel of narcissistic goats who keep jumping on guests’ cars to admire themselves in the paintwork — or so says the hotel handyman (Michael Patric) who enjoys shooting the offenders with his ever-present crossbow. As a bonus, there’s a witch patrolling the hotel’s now-sealed honeymoon suite — the fetid location where Ohm’s overstuffed psychological baggage will eventually be unpacked.
Reveling in misdirection and a teasing duality — Jerry initially presents as both sincere helper and loony hindrance — “Hokum” profits from Colm Hogan’s insinuating camera as it noses through gloomy corridors and a terrifying dumbwaiter shaft, hinting at what lurks on the other side of the frame. A wonderfully spooky production design (by Til Frohlich) braces the ominous atmosphere as Ohm searches for a missing hotel employee (Florence Ordesh) while battling demons of both the corporeal and ethereal varieties. A shocking ending to the first act derails our expectations and opens the door for multiple interpretations of what follows: Is Ohm grappling with the supernatural, or hallucinating a way to purge his trauma and overcome his writer’s block? Or is something even more sinister going on?
I’m not telling, and neither is McCarthy, whose sneaky script seems especially suited to Scott’s slightly stunned acting style and a line delivery that leans naturally toward snark. Ohm isn’t simply unpleasant, he can be cruel; yet, unlike many horror movies, “Hokum” hews closer to hope than cynicism, suggesting that we could all benefit from laying down our burdens. This cheeky approach to the uncanny is one of McCarthy’s signatures, allowing him to tweak his setups in ways that can turn gasps into giggles. If you asked him, he would probably say that either was the correct response.
Hokum Rated R for distressing deaths and a disturbed spirit. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters.
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