Hokum /ˈhoʊkəm/ noun.
[noncount] informal
Chiefly US: foolish or untrue words or ideas. Nonsense.
Irish director Damian McCarthy has been refining his craft over his three features. Caveat and Oddity were both excellent, but Hokum is a special blend of folk horror, haunted hotel, crime, and deep-seated guilt that plays with genre in a clever and intuitive manner. Adam Scott portrays Ohm Bauman, a bestselling novelist who is haunted by an incident in his past. Ohm is misanthropic, alcoholic, and generally unpleasant and combative. He makes the decision to take his parents’ ashes to Southern Ireland to the Billberry Woods Hotel where they honeymooned. It was the last place he knew for sure they were happy before his mother’s untimely death and his father’s moody alcoholism.
Before he has stepped foot through the door Ohm has a run in with Bilberry employee Fergal (Michael Patric) over a large, and dead, Bilberry goat. Ohm wonders if it was really necessary to take a crossbow to the animal and brushes off Fergal’s explanation that they are a feral menace. Once inside the hotel Ohm overhears an elderly man frightening two children with a tale of the local Cailleach – an Irish hag witch whose powers come to the fore from Samhain until Beltane. Ohm tells the children to go find their parents. The elderly man turns out to be Mr. Cobb (Brendan Conroy) who terrorises his son-in-law Mal (Peter Coonan) who manages the hotel.
Ohm’s rudeness is challenged by Fiona (Florence Ordesh) who also works at the hotel. Unused to pushback Ohm changes his tone with her and apologises, he also finds himself talking to her at the bar while he drinks heavily after finding the large tree where his mother was photographed and spreads her ashes carefully. He is less careful with his fathers. In the forest he encounters Jerry (David Wilmost) a local man who lives on the periphery and has a habit of drinking magic mushroom powder in goat’s milk. The two of them also form a small bond that will later become firmer and more intense.
The Bilberry Woods Hotel has one room that is off-limits to all the guests and staff. The Honeymoon Suite is said to contain a Cailleach who was trapped by Mr. Cobb many years ago. Alby (Will O’Connell) the bellhop tells a story of encountering the hag in the elevator shaft to which Ohm claims “hokum.” His newly found manners don’t extend to Alby who fancies himself an author also and ends up insulted and burned for his efforts. Ohm’s cynicism mixes with his drunkenness and he makes a seemingly final decision. He hangs himself in his room but is saved by Fiona who had a bad feeling that something was off.
When Ohm gets out of hospital weeks later and goes to collect his belongings, he is made aware that Fiona went missing during the Halloween party. He’d hoped to thank her for saving his life and feels that he owes it to her to look for her. The hotel is shuttering because it is the end of the season and no one wants Ohm or anyone else hanging around. The local Gardaí are already looking for Jerry whose wife died under unclear circumstances a few years earlier. Fergal insists that Fiona can’t be in the hotel, or she would have been found, and there is no way she entered the Honeymoon Suite as it is locked off via the elevator.
Ohm leaves the hotel but finds himself searching for Jerry in the woods. He finds Jerry’s van and inside it is a copy of Fiona’s folklore guide. Jerry hasn’t left the area, and he tells Ohm that he’s sure that Fiona is in the Honeymoon Suite as he saw her ghost pointing at a ringing service bell. Jerry has stolen Mr. Cobb’s elevator gate key and plans to search for Fiona once everyone has left the hotel. Ohm decides to join him despite not believing his story about the ghost. They return to the hotel, but it is not as empty as they anticipated. Humans, ghosts, and witchy dealings await, and Ohm is about to have a very bad hotel stay in the Honeymoon Suite.
Damian McCarthy throws a lot at the proverbial wall in terms of horror tropes and in this instance they stick with an ever-increasing feeling of dread. The Honeymoon Suite is a dark and dank room of neglect and Ohm is locked in there with no means of escape. The only possible way out is via a one-way dumb waiter to the basement which is a different kind of threatening. McCarthy keeps upping the tension, or (literally) turning the screw on Ohm’s predicament. The goings-on Ohm dismissed as hokum certainly feel real and are definitely a threat to his sanity and his life. Well-timed and well-earned jump scares punctuate the atmosphere of rot and death. Clocks toll, lights burn out, televisions turn on to reveal personal nightmare creatures. Ohm only has his freaked-out wits, a lantern, and a hip flask of scotch to keep him afloat as malevolent forces seek to end him.
Hokum is a masterclass in spooky atmosphere melding with ramped up supernatural and man-made horror. Adam Scott is wonderfully messed up as the caustic and wounded Ohm who pays a hefty toll for both the devils and the better angels of his personality. David Wilmot proves that he is one of Ireland’s most adaptable character actors as Jerry. McCarthy relishes in the sinister and the absurd in abundance allowing for a certain levity that has been missing in his previous work. The humour is a necessary part of the catharsis when watching Hokum because it is, at heart, a very dark work that shreds the nerves of both the protagonist and the audience.
Hokum is, simply put, a great contemporary horror film that moves through its stages with agility. Claustrophobic, funny, emotionally weighted, and very Irish; Hokum announces Damian McCarthy as a major creative voice and a horror maestro.
[Hokum screened as the opening night film for the Fantastic Film Festival Australia]
Director: Damian McCarthy
Cast: Adam Scott, David Wilmot, Peter Coonan, Florence Ordesh
Writers: Damian McCarthy
Cinematographer: Colm Hogan
Editor: Brian Philip Davis