Director: Damian McCarthy
Cast: Adam Scott, Peter Coonan, David Wilmot, Florence Ordesh, Michael Patric, Will O’Connell, Brendan Conroy, Austin Amelio
Screenplay: Damian McCarthy
107 mins. Rated R for some violent/disturbing content, and language.

Following on the strong success of Oddity, Damian McCarthy is back with another folk horror fable, this time playing with childhood trauma, self-loathing, and the horrors of male violence while taking cues from Stephen King’s novel The Shining and its Kubrick adaptation.

Novelist Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott, The Monkey) has been harboring a horrible accident from his childhood, one that has infected his entire life and left him hopeless. While struggling to finish his mega-hit book series, Ohm travels to the Bilberry Woods Hotel in Ireland to scatter his parents’ ashes somewhere they truly loved. Upon arrival, he becomes interested in the hotel’s legend of a witch trapped in the honeymoon suite who now supposedly haunts the room. Soon, an employee of the hotel has disappeared in the suite, leading Ohm and another peculiar resident of the local forest to explore the honeymoon suite in order to, hopefully, find her alive.

McCarthy’s storytelling is often all about scrounging together Irish folklore and myths and finding an interesting way to distill them for a strong and spooky atmosphere. To this day, I can’t quite think of any movies that feel exactly like Caveat and Oddity. Hokum is probably McCarthy’s most accessible and traditional plots, but even there, the way its all orchestrated is uniquely McCarthy (this man has got a thing for scary rabbits), and the finished product stretches out into unexpected pathways, almost playing like a fly-on-the-wall horror escape room. What I love most about McCarthy’s direction is how confident he is with the atmosphere and timing of his scares, with less focus on jump scares and more attention on steadily building dread and playing with what his audience sees. There are more than a few scares in the film that are completely visual without any reliance on the musical score.

Through all of his films, McCarthy explores male violence upon women, and Hokum is no different. I won’t dive into the specifics as the mystery unfolds, but suffice to say, McCarthy plays two instances of male violence against each other that actually makes each more nuanced and fascinating to unfurl, and I even found the Hokum to thematically uplift his previous films as well. The visuals and dreamery of the hotel and what else lies just beyond the honeymoon suite makes works to conjure up some of Ohm’s own past is a satisfying way.

Adam Scott has always been a stronger dramatic actor that his heavy comedic background would allow, and he’s especially strong in his horror roles. With Hokum’s release, a lot of people don’t realize that he’s practically on the level of Justin Long in terms of his sneaky amount of genre offerings. From Hellraiser: Bloodline (yeah, the one in space) to Piranha and most recently The Monkey, Adam Scott has consistently been a horror darling, and his performance here might be the best of his career. He weaves between being terribly unlikable and completely understandable as Ohm, and he cleverly restrains his performance when needed to create a compellingly-flawed protagonist.

Damian McCarthy has a unique voice in the world of horror, and I hope he continues to widen his scope as he’s done here with his most accessible and maybe best outing yet. A master of building scares and nervous laughter, McCarthy and the team are having fun scaring you, and it shows in this inspired little haunt. With a strong cast of characters and a career-best performance from Scott, McCarthy is taking a lot of familiar elements and playing with them in a distinctive way. Hokum is a blast and I can’t wait to see it again knowing the full scope of McCarthy’s vision.

4/5
-Kyle A. Goethe

• More Damian McCarthy: Oddity (2024)