Hokum – Review

The Irish are coming with their horror movies. After the grossed-out possessed-mummy in Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, here comes Damian McCarthy’s Hokum – a less loud, spookier, and more atmospheric slow burner set in a haunted hotel in remote Ireland. A very relentless witch drags people in chains into the pit of hell, down below in its basement.

Bet you this customer-service downer isn’t mentioned in Trip.com or any tourist brochure.  

What is it about the Irish and their sense of playfulness? Wicked humour? Superstitions? Folklore of fairies, banshees and nasty little leprechauns? Heck, even their rowdy pub songs can sound terrifying. These Emerald Isle inhabitants can really cook up a horror feast. 

Hokum here is a tight, enjoyable spooky-inn chiller plonked right into the old country, where its cold, ominous, stuck-in-myth Irish air is prominently felt. Naturally (or unnaturally), this film is full of horror tropes: a cackling demon, dark, empty corridors, dim rooms, fluttering footsteps, and a foreboding dungeon. Then, there are strange locals reeking of booze who seem guilty of something. One chap shoots a very pointy crossbow. What’s wrong with these mad-dieval folks? McCarthy habitually loves to insert this weapon into his films.

Still, this flick, starring Adam Scott from TV’s Parks and Recreation as a famed American author, Ohm Bauman, who checks into the Bilberry Woods Hotel, is pretty good at making us feel creepily tense. Going there for personal and professional reasons – he has writer’s block – Bauman thinks that ghosts are hokum despite the inn natives warning him about the supernatural entity. He pooh-poohs the old wives’ tale about drawing a circle of chalk around him to ward off the witch’s attack. Not wise.

By inn natives, we’re talking about characters straight out of an Usual Suspects’ playbook. Friendly bartender Fiona (Florence Ordesh), front-desk guy Mal (Peter Coonan), harmless bellhop Alby (William O’Connell), intimidating groundskeeper Fergal (Michael Patric), and Jerry (David Wilmot), a mysterious bloke in the woods who looks like a doped-up madman. He grows magic mushrooms. Oh, these trippy Irish. 

Bauman is told that the locked-up Honeymoon Suite, where his late parents resided on their honeymoon long ago, is haunted by said witch. Meaning, of course, that while he’s there to lay their ashes to rest among the trees outside, he’s definitely going to enter that damn place. Who the hell doesn’t break into a forbidden room in a horror movie, right? Things become more urgent when a murder mystery pops up, making the setting look Agatha Christie-ish. Fiona, the most normal staff member, goes missing after a Halloween party. Bauman pokes around the innards of the hotel to find out what happened to her.  

Plus, he’s being plagued by spooky visions of his murdered mom, who was shot by a home intruder when he was a kid. Via flashbacks, we see that Bauman was a witness in the house that tragic day.   Boy, is this cynical, disbelieving, cocky Trump-era Yank, channelling his inner haunted-hotel Stephen King, heading for a big pee-in-the-pants surprise here when snoop meets spook.

The opening scene here shows Bauman struggling with his new novel about a Spanish conquistador and a child facing doom in a bone-dry desert, but it’s profoundly bleak and indicates that this dude, although looking very put together, is all broken up inside with a big secret. Yet, despite this hidden trauma, the man is still a mean American SOB in the way he burns bellhop Alby’s hand to push him away after the latter, an aspiring writer, tries to hand him his own manuscript to read. Now, Scott is great in subtly underlining this unkind streak as smug over-confidence until it faces the way nastier, scarier version from you-know-who. 

The thing is, you’re so absorbed by the murder bit that you kind of forget that there’s even a witch on the loose here, since both plot arcs are given equal weightage. This murder portion is riveting enough, as its mystery unravels, to stand on its own steam without the demon input. 

So, Hokum does feel, in parts, sort of redundant as a pic of two separate halves. There are connections, of course, but somehow, you just feel that McCarthy, who also wrote this story, needs to segue one genre into the next more convincingly. While the horror maniacs in Asia won’t be scared out of their wits by the Western-style jump scares, hardened by far more graphic Thai, Korean, and Japanese horror tricks, there’s something really unholy and unhinged in Hokum that keeps approaching closer and closer in a darkened tunnel. It’s coming. We can’t see it. But we can hear it. Coming. Coming. Coming. Too late. It’s right up your face, like a taxman on Audit Day.

There’s also an unnerving scene featuring a bed surrounded by white curtains – think a harem bed, but more frightening – especially after someone or something sticks a truly ghastly visage right through the wraps that will give you nightmares until next Wednesday. And man, what this film does with an eerie, very confined dumbwaiter-elevator shooting up and down from a safe place to a sinister basement desperately. 

It should be noted that McCarthy previously made Oddity in 2024, an Irish horror flick featuring a curio shop, and he knows how to make little things, such as an old spring-loaded clock with tiny figurines, suspenseful up to the last second. Expect similar scares here, proving that this Irishman’s horror-movie skills in Hokum are definitely not hokum.

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