In the first few moments while watching Hokum, I was taken by the color palette. It looked familiar somehow and dipping into the movie felt like visiting a neighbor. Later, I learned Hokum’s director and writer is Damian McCarthy who also wrote and directed Oddity, one of my favorite horror movies that’s come out in the last few years. When people ask for a recent scary movie, that’s one I usually recommend. McCarthy has a distinctive visual vocabulary between his films that makes me excited to see how it expands in future movies. His style gives the impression that there’s something rotten and festering, just below the surface.
In Hokum, a writer named Ohm (Adam Scott) is just putting the final, grim touches on his latest conquistador novel, part of a best-selling series, and once he’s finished that, he ponders his mother and father’s cremains while studying a photo of his mother taken in Ireland during her honeymoon. She stands next to a ginormous tree, her face happy and smiling, and the viewer’s not sure if Ohm hates her or loves her at this moment. At most, he seems apathetic. He’s plagued by bad dreams where black-and-white cartoon characters come to life and menace him, and that’s all we really know about his character until he arrives at the Bilberry Woods Hotel in Ireland, the same place where his parents honeymooned.
Right away, as Ohm speaks with the hotel groundskeeper Fergal (Michael Patric), we see he’s not a likeable character, with a sharp, acerbic tongue that he uses on everyone. No one is spared. I think it’s difficult to do an antihero protagonist since that’s the main focus in a story, and if the character tips too far into mean, you lose the audience because nobody wants to spend any time with that person. But actor Scott does a good job with his material, showing that Ohm is hurting from his past. There’s something rotten in him that matches the setting, but at the same time, there’s a glimmer of humanity that seems worth saving.
In the dark and eerie woods surrounding the inn, he runs into a mystical homeless man, Jerry (David Wilmot), who tells him everything is not as it seems while sipping on his home brew of milk laced with mushrooms. Jerry’s an upstart who clashes with Fergal over his habit of killing goats because they jump up on car hoods and offers the writer some of his mushroom cocktail. Ohm declines but does partake in his straight liquor before retiring to the inn’s bar.
Ohm is curious about why the inn’s honeymoon suite is locked and cordoned off, and the barkeep Fiona (Florence Ordesh) tells him of the legend of a witch who supposedly haunts the rooms. Ohm takes a liking to Fiona as she serves him glass after glass of whiskey and seems to be the only staff member willing to give him lip back. Ohm tells her about the ending of his latest novel, which she pronounces “bleak.”
Later, Ohm’s cut off at the bar and stumbles back to his cozy cottagecore room where he inexplicably tries to kill himself. Along with her knowledge of folklore, Fiona seems to also have the gift of second sight and feels that something’s off with Ohm, insisting that the bellhop break down the locked door. They find the writer hanging from a noose, and in the next scene, he wakes in a hospital bed, seemingly shocked by what’s happened. Bellhop Alby (Will O’Connell), an aspiring writer, visits Ohm and lets him know that Fiona saved his life, though she’s now missing.
Later, Ohm’s discharged from the hospital, intending to fly home to America. He stops at the inn to pick up his car and belongings when he encounters Jerry, who tells him of a dream he had about Fiona. He believes she’s still inside the inn. Bilberry Woods Hotel is being shut down for the season à la the Overlook in Stephen King’s The Shining, and McCarthy acknowledges the homage. He told Rue Morgue, “Well, I guess, to start with, the story just came from the idea of wanting to throw my hat into the ring of haunted hotel subgenres. So you have things like The Shining, 1408, and The Innkeepers. I like those movies. And it felt like the haunted hotel just really wasn’t something that had been explored in a few years. So that was pretty much the start of it.”
Once Ohm reenters the inn, the movie takes a deep dive into Irish folklore, and the writer ends up stuck in the haunted honeymoon suite, trying to figure out how how to get out of there. The witch haunting the rooms seems similar to a banshee with the keening wails that erupt every so often when she makes her appearance. There’s also a nod to the Irish dullahan, a headless horseman, and seeing this older folklore on the screen was fresh and exciting just because I haven’t seen it in such a long time.
For the most part, I liked the ending, but there was a last-minute plant of Was it all a dream?, which I didn’t care for. For ninety minutes, I committed to this idea of a haunted hotel and writer, and I didn’t appeciate the attempt to take it all away at the end. That was the only thing that marred the movie for me.
So again, I’m finding my road with this year’s literary and film journey, and Hokum dovetails back to other films and books I’ve been seeing and reading. With the cremains showing up in this movie and a character dealing with the issue of mortality, both his own and his parents, that ties directly back to S.A. Cosby’s King of Ashes and Is God Is. I think I’m going to purposely look for thematic links in all the media I consume and see what is emerging. It makes me wonder if certain trends are being followed and that’s why things are similar, or is it me purposely seeking out these works because I need them right now?
