Hokum Movie Review – Damian McCarthy’s Third Horror Has Scares but Lacks Impact

Three movies in, Damian McCarthy continues his morbid fascination with setting up atmosphere-heavy horror movies that take place primarily in confined spaces within isolated settings. In Caveat, it’s a decaying remote house on a deserted island. In Oddity, it’s a countryside abode. And now, in his latest movie Hokum, he chooses the hotel setting in a secluded Irish location.

This time, the protagonist is Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott), a bestselling author known for his book trilogy about a conquistador and a young boy. Earlier in the movie, McCarthy conjures a startling fright through a jump scare. His past two movies utilized jump scares sparingly, and they never felt like cheap tactics just for the sake of it. But in Hokum, he has somehow given in to repeating not once but a few more times later in the movie, particularly after Bauman checks into the hotel.

Apparently, his late parents used to go there on their honeymoon, and now, he wants to scatter their ashes after holding on to them for so long. McCarthy portrays Bauman as an arrogant jerk with the kind of big-city attitude when speaking to the local hotel staff. For instance, he barely cares whether the bellboy Alby (Will O’Connell) is a fan of his work. But despite coming across as an unlikable protagonist, he somewhat warms up to the hotel’s bartender, Fiona (Florence Ordesh), even though he gets off on the wrong foot when they first meet in the corridor.

Then, throughout his stay at the hotel, he learns that the honeymoon suite is strictly off-limits because it’s haunted, complete with a metal gate in front of the elevator leading upstairs that is locked. Soon, the story reaches a turning point: Fiona mysteriously disappears after a Halloween party, prompting Bauman to try to locate her. None of the staff, even the hotel’s manager Mal (Peter Coonan), has any idea where she is. From here, McCarthy begins piling up the scares by subsequently trapping Bauman in the hotel. The honeymoon suite, to be exact.

This is where the jump scares recur every now and then, highlighting nightmarish imagery from the eerie sight of a man in a rabbit suit to the ghostly woman figure lurking somewhere in the dark. The latter would occasionally pop up as if McCarthy feels the need to maximize the jump-scare quota. It was uncharacteristically McCarthy’s way of directing his horror feature, where he often favors slow-burning dread over traditional scares. Don’t get me wrong, they are scary and well-executed at first. But after a while, there is only so much a confined horror movie can do with jump scares.

The biggest disappointment comes from McCarthy’s screenplay itself. It’s like a hodgepodge of different ideas tossed against the wall to see if they stick. The story wants to delve into Bauman’s traumatic past and how it affects him emotionally and psychologically, which somehow ties to what’s going on in the hotel. Speaking of the hotel, there’s a spooky tale about the witch, and not to forget the mystery surrounding Fiona’s disappearance.

The movie also introduces a supporting character named Jerry (David Wilmot), an eccentric vagabond who made his own alcoholic concoction and a bottle of milk spiked with magic mushrooms. Beyond his odd personality, he seems to know something about the haunting of the honeymoon suite in the hotel.

While there’s nothing wrong with a director trying to weave multiple story threads in a single movie, McCarthy’s needlessly intricate yet patchy storytelling tends to make me frustrated about how everything would tie up at the end of the movie. So, instead of an intriguing payoff after watching the poor Bauman going through the ordeal, the movie culminates in a sadly underwhelming finale. That’s a pity, especially given the fact that this is the first time McCarthy collaborated with Neon, the highly acclaimed indie distributor and studio known for its elevated horrors and arthouse titles.

After showing a lot of promise in the much superior Caveat and Oddity, which in turn establishes McCarthy as one of the must-see horror filmmakers hailed from Ireland, I was expecting that he would strike a third winner in a row in Hokum. No doubt that McCarthy’s third directorial feature has a few effective frights and Adam Scott trying his best to play an emotionally troubled author grappling with his own personal demons, there aren’t enough to overcome most of the movie’s shortcomings.

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