After the breakthrough of Oddity in 2024, the horror community eagerly anticipated what Irish genre filmmaker Damian McCarthy would do next. And here he is with his first sizeable studio release, Hokum, a movie that fits well within the “elevated horror” tropes of shrouding the entire thing in mystery during its marketing campaign and asking audiences to discover it for themselves. However—and much to this critic’s chagrin—, the film should have been titled Ho-Hum, as the compelling hook of McCarthy’s screenplay eventually turns into a dull and very familiar haunted house thriller, with the layer of Irish folklore added into the mix.
Discussion
The movie is very difficult to talk about without revealing a single plot element, since most of it has been kept under wraps. McCarthy hopes you’ll be drawn into his thrilling mise-en-abyme of a conquistador attempting to open up a bottle with a treasure map in it, which will inevitably be interlinked to author Ohm Bauman’s (Adam Scott) personal story, even if he is currently writing the one we’re looking at on screen.
For a good chunk of Hokum’s first half, the movie works wonders. McCarthy knows how to create a dread-inducing atmosphere right from the get-go, as Ohm can’t quite figure out his ending to his best-selling Conquistador trilogy, and thus travels to Ireland to finally scatter the ashes of his deceased parents. That’s about as far as I’ll go in revealing anything because this is also where the movie switches gears. Ohm checks into a quaint hotel in the Irish countryside, where its honeymoon suite is locked, because it’s apparently haunted by a witch.
Damian McCarthy’s Direction
If this proposition doesn’t tantalize you, just know that McCarthy spends a considerable amount of time making Hokum a poignant study on grief and unprocessed trauma. Those elements can’t necessarily be spoiled in a review, but they are the movie’s strongest parts. Particularly, Scott gives the best performance of his entire big screen career, one that he’s been naturally building towards ever since he began starring in Apple TV’s Severance. One might not have thought of him as a compelling dramatic presence beforehand, but he’s genuinely on a whole other level, especially when McCarthy begins to tap into Ohm’s most vulnerable aspects.
The Irish writer-director is also unafraid to tackle difficult subjects head-on, which could prove distressing for some viewers. Yet, I appreciated how open it was in making us aware of Ohm’s inner demons. Regardless of how long it’s been since his parents passed away, his trauma will likely never recover. It’s hard to even think about moving on in a desolate world where loneliness is your best friend and seclusion (with many glasses of whiskey) acts as a better medicine than being out in the open.
Shifting the Narrative
When the movie arrives in Ireland, it begins to shift gears, but not fully. Ohm remains the film’s protagonist until a point, when he is involved in a fairly tragic event alongside another character. That’s where McCarthy turns this rather personal (and surprisingly meditative) study on an author’s grief into a witch story. It’s also where Hokum begins to derail. Without giving too much away, McCarthy’s screenplay goes into a thousand different directions, while confining Ohm to a single location for much of its second half.
While Hokum is appropriately atmospheric and contains a bevy of strong images, every element about its conceit—from the haunted hotel to the characters who grow more psychotic as the movie progresses—does not gel. Instead, they create cracks in the narrative that weren’t present when McCarthy focused on the inner demons of his protagonist. Ultimately, when we get to the witch and see the extent of its powers, I can’t lie, it’s downright scary. The image of a broken Ohm attempting to atone for his sins, while sitting in the middle of a chalk-drawn circle (to repel the witch), holds real, tangible power.
Some Good, Some Bad
A couple of nifty moments are sprinkled into the movie’s overlong structure, and McCarthy does know how to stage effective atmospheric horror. However, everything around Ohm is pitifully underdeveloped. The hotel staff members are played by genuinely great actors, but they’re given little to work with other than archetypal tropes that never allow their characters to meaningfully grow in the same way as Hokum’s protagonists. Even characters outside the hotel—such as the hipster Jerry (David Wilmot), who enjoys goat’s milk mixed with magic mushrooms—don’t get as much texture as Ohm. It also doesn’t help that all supporting characters are essentially walking and talking clichés.
Most unimpressively so, the bulk of the imagery that McCarthy lays out on screen is directly robbed from The Shining and David Lynch’s Rabbits, if that means anything. There are a few effective jumpscares. Still, that’s only because our director knows how to play with rhythm, not because of their originality. It results in a rather hollow and overstuffed horror movie that compels our imagination at first but fails to hold our attention as it reaches a very long (and never-ending) conclusion, stretching the runtime to near interminable heights until its central study becomes uninteresting.
Final Thoughts on Hokum
Thank God for Adam Scott, whose sole presence heightens Hokum’s ho-hum mechanics into a watchable folk horror film, even if the overall result disappoints. If anything, it shows that he’s ready for the next stage of his career, away from the comedy that has defined most of his work, into more psychologically active and disturbing territories. If this is what he wants to do, then he’s more than ready for it and will likely blow us all away in an even better movie than the one we ultimately paid a ticket to see.
Damian McCarthy’s Hokum comes to theaters in the United States, Ireland, and the United Kingdom on May 1st!
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