With such articulate craftsmanship and palpable appreciation for atmospheric horror, Hokum, despite its overreliance on common tropes, consistently grips, puzzles and entertains.
Hokum is a classically plotted but deeply atmospheric horror film. It boasts a haunted-house premise, a flawed protagonist, and a gimmick that serves as a mask for deeper, more internal themes. Anyone familiar with horrors like Robert Wise’s The Haunting will know what they’re in for. Yet the film crafts its genre tropes with such confidence and shares its themes with such rawness that it’s easy to become lost in its filmmaking.
Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) is a bitter, jaded American author staying in a hotel in a rural part of Ireland. His parents have both passed away (the circumstances surrounding his mother’s death weigh heavily on his mind), and he has come to Ireland partially to spread his parents’ ashes. Suffering from writer’s block and a depression he keeps bottled up, Ohm is rude and sarcastic with everyone he meets, only taking a mild liking to one of the staff, Fiona (Florence Ordesh), who has banter and spooky stories to match his cynicism.
After a traumatic night, however, Ohm discovers that Fiona has gone missing. The fellow staff seem mystified by the disappearance, but one rumour keeps persisting – that the hotel’s honeymoon suite is haunted by a witch, who may have somehow lured Fiona into the sealed off quarters. Joined by the local crazy person, Jerry (David Wilmot), who claims to have seen Fiona’s ghost calling out to him, Ohm decides to investigate, coming face to face with ominous revelations, internal and external alike.
Writer-director Damian Mc Carthy has long been interested in the horror genre – he’s also the mind behind Caveat and Oddity. With Hokum, he adopts a traditional haunted house concept with a hotel twist. However, what McCarthy also understands is that great horrors use terrifying, sometimes otherworldly, setups as a way of exploring internal human conflict – Don’t Look Now with grief, The Exorcist with spiritual existentialism, and so forth. Hokum, a word often used to mean nonsense, is anything but nonsensical, for it sets up and intimately explores the human capacity for violence and its fallout. The result is familiar, and perhaps not all that groundbreaking, but still a strong, entertaining spookfest.
McCarthy and team utilise visuals to build suspense and leave us on edge. While the film does venture into the nearby woods and features a couple of other settings, the bulk of the story takes place in the hotel rooms, creating a sense of claustrophobia even as everything seems mundane. Dark lighting and tight production design create a palpable feeling of entrapment as secrets are spilt, and the narrative is paced deliberately so as not to show its hand too early.
The blocking of the picture is particularly good, enhanced by Brian Phillip Davis’ editing and Colm Hogan’s cinematography. When the characters are intensely in the foreground, the film includes obscured movements in the background, such as other, unknown figures, which the characters are not privy to. Whether these movements are literal or metaphorical, they make the picture all the more hair-raising, adding to our uncertainty about what will happen. It gives us just enough detail to get an idea of what’s happening, then lets our frightened imaginations fill in the blanks, often building on the folklore the characters discuss.
Like many modern horror films, the picture features several jump scares. This would normally be a point of ire as jump scares are cheap, low-hanging fruit in the wrong movie. Luckily, similar to The Woman in Black, most of the jump scares in Hokum are things that should legitimately shock us, rather than boring fakeouts. This makes the intensity and anxiety all the more palpable. Plus, so much of the film relies on an atmosphere of unease over sudden shocks that it’s earned the right to a few jump scares if it so wishes.
Intriguing characters occupy the screen, elevating the craft. Many of the side characters are enjoyable players that give the story some flavour, be it the mad-as-a-hatter Jerry, Fiona’s down-to-earth humanity or the awkward but endearing bellboy Alby (Will O’Connell). But Ohm proves as compelling and sympathetic as he is derisive. His attitude is merely a front he puts on to cope with deeper emotional strife that the supposed spirits physically represent. It’s a fairly obvious use of metaphors. Still, it nonetheless grants Ohm some more dimensions to his character, making him an engaging anti-hero – a curmudgeon who still has a degree of principle and remorse. Scott juggles the various layers of the character well, hurling blunt venom while keeping hurt firmly caged.
The film is ultimately a meditation on the destabilising nature of guilt and greed. Without spoiling the mystery, Hokum reminded me of the underrated Gwen, a Welsh horror film that made similar observations as Hokum – that the potential malice of spirits and folklore is nothing compared to what humans are capable of. This is particularly true of Ohm, whose guilty conscience is amplified by the presence of apparent spirits in this hotel, the story’s conflict forcing him to confront himself more than anything else. It may not have that much in the way of surprises, but there’s an earnestness and an assuredness to the way it conducts itself that it’s hard not to get lost in its suspense or eeriness.
Once you’re onto the film’s ambitions and themes, it’s not difficult to predict how it’s all going to play out. In that sense, it strictly sticks to its classical setup, arguably to a fault. But this by no means makes the film dull – quality is in the execution after all. With such articulate craftsmanship and palpable appreciation for atmospheric horror, Hokum, despite its overreliance on common tropes, consistently grips, puzzles and entertains. If nothing else, it showcases how Mc Carthy is an up-and-coming force to be reckoned with in the contemporary horror scene.
Hokum is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
Follow Us