Decal Releasing
With his third feature film, filmmaker Damian Mc Carthy’s latest effort, Hokum, tells the story of Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott), a chronically surly horror author struggling to write the conclusion for his trilogy as he travels to an Irish countryside hotel to scatter his deceased parents’ ashes in a place meaningful to them.
However, increasingly strange things happen from the moment Ohm sets foot in the hotel.
He then finds himself caught up in an unsettling mystery involving things that all sound too tired and overdone to be true, but many horrors may manifest in many ways in the Irish countryside.
All of this indeed sounds like hokum, like tired tropes many a horror fan has sat through a myriad of times before, but Mc Carthy manages to spin this story into a tale both familiar and unpredictable.
Mc Carthy constantly plays with the viewer’s expectations of both haunted hotel horror in general and Mc Carthy’s filmmaking approach in particular.
The horror irregularly but effectively uses gore elements, but even more improbable is how jump scares are used both meaningfully and impactfully throughout the film, cementing an otherworldly and ancient sense of dread that saturates the film and continuously raises the stakes and sense of peril.
At once both atmospherically eerie and slyly self-aware, Hokum creates a bewitching mesh of unnerving visuals and continuously mounting tension interlaced with just the right amount of humor at the right intervals to disarm the viewer and suck them further into a world that becomes increasingly threatening as the film goes on.
Scott makes Ohm deeply unlikable yet still compelling, which is a difficult balance to achieve, but he does so impeccably with both deadpan wit as well as subtlety and nuance, keeping the viewer invested as he tries to figure what is going on, showcasing as much bemusement and unease as the viewer watching the events unfold along with Ohm.
For the Irish cast, it seems almost as if Mc Carthy has directed them to be in a significantly more humorous and tongue-in-cheek film than Scott seems to have been directed to convey, giving the performances of the Irish cast a dynamic that seems at odds with Ohm’s more traditionally brusque haunted author character.
Mc Carthy had already made his mark on the horror landscape with Caveat and Oddity, and with Hokum he hones his craft in a manner that results in a deeply eerie and atmospheric tale that leaves you both startled and amused at just the right intervals in one of the best horror films of the year thus far.
Extras include commentary, making of documentary, a film short, and trailers.
