In a sentenceAdam Scott checks into a hotel with a witch in the honeymoon suite and, being a writer, presses record
Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott), a novelist, arrives at a remote hotel in rural Ireland where, as the sign might as well read, they have been expecting him. He carries a dictaphone and a grudge against the world, and he has come with a purpose of his own that has to do with his mother rather than with a holiday. The honeymoon suite is said to have a witch (Sioux Carroll) in it. Nobody at the hotel seems to find this remarkable. Among the people he meets are Mal (Peter Coonan), Jerry (David Wilmot), Fiona (Florence Ordesh) and Cob (Brendan Conroy), each of whom knows more about the building than they are saying. Ohm wants to get on with his business and leave. The hotel has other plans, and it starts making them known in the corridors after dark.
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Damian McCarthy’s third film puts Adam Scott in a rural Irish hotel with a witch upstairs and frightens us properly for an hour. Then it piles on more plot than it can carry. Good, jumpy and a little untidy; worth your evening if horror is yours.
Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) is a novelist, and a sour one, who drives out to a hotel in rural Ireland where the honeymoon suite is said to contain a witch. That is the premise of Hokum, and Damian McCarthy, who wrote and directed it, treats it with a perfectly straight face. The people in the hotel do not argue about whether the witch is real. They argue about who has to go up there. The film is good, it is frightening for most of its first hour, and in its second it keeps adding rooms to a house that was already full. At 108 minutes it is not long; it just has too many keys on the ring.
Scott is the right man for it. He plays Ohm as cold rather than rattled, a man who has decided the world is stupid and is irritated to find it is also dangerous. He carries a dictaphone and talks into it in a flat voice while things go wrong around him, and the joke, which McCarthy never underlines, is that a horror novelist is the one person in the building who ought to know better. When the coldness finally cracks, Scott lets it happen slowly and without fuss. It is the best thing in the film.
The hotel is the second best thing. Til Frohlich’s production design gives it low ceilings, long corridors and the kind of furniture that was expensive once, and the honeymoon suite itself is dressed with a care that makes you want to leave before anything happens in it. Colm Hogan shoots wide and keeps the edges of the frame dim, so that for most of the film you are checking the corners rather than watching the actor in the middle. Lara Campbell puts Ohm in a dark coat he never seems to take off, which tells you how he feels about the place without a word.
The scares are built, not sprung. Brian Philip Davis cuts them with patience: a long hold on a door, a cut away, a return that is a fraction later than you expected. Joseph Bishara’s score mostly stays out of the way and lets the building do the work, and the sound of the place, floorboards and pipes and something upstairs that might be a footstep, does more than any violin could. We jumped, properly, twice in the first hour, and were slightly cross with ourselves both times, because on reflection we could see exactly how each one had been set up. That is craft, and it is rarer in this genre than it should be. Not every scare lands; a couple in the second half announce themselves from a room away.
Around Scott, the cast plays the strangeness as ordinary. Peter Coonan’s Mal and David Wilmot’s Jerry treat the witch the way you might treat a boiler that needs looking at, and Brendan Conroy’s Cob is odder still, in a way we will leave you to discover. Most of the film’s laughs come from this, from nobody being nearly as alarmed as Ohm is, and the laughs are real. Sioux Carroll, as the witch, is used sparingly, which is the correct decision.
The trouble starts around the hour mark. There is a story about Ohm’s mother (Mallory Adams) underneath the hotel business, and as the film goes on it cares more about that story and less about the building. Fair enough; horror is allowed to be about grief. But McCarthy keeps the witch, the locals and several other threads running at the same time, and by the last twenty minutes we were confused rather than frightened, which is not the same thing. The ending, which we will not describe, is warmer than the film before it has earned. Some critics have found that grace; we found it a little soft.
McCarthy’s two earlier films were smaller and tighter than this, and their limits were part of their strength. Hokum is his most ambitious film and his least disciplined. We would rather he had over-reached than repeated himself, and he has, but the film that lives inside this one, a man and a room and something upstairs, is better than the one that surrounds it.
See it in a cinema if you can, where the sound has space to get behind you. At home you will be tempted to look at your phone during the last twenty minutes, and the film would not entirely blame you.
Most critics come away frightened and pleased. Fourteen of eighteen reviews are positive, and several call Damian McCarthy’s third feature his most accomplished. The praise settles in the same places: Adam Scott’s cranky, slowly unravelling novelist, whom more than one reviewer calls perfectly cast; the hotel itself, singled out for its production design and its haunted escape-room nastiness; and McCarthy’s control of tension, with the editing, the sound and the jump scares drawing repeated mention. Several also find it funnier than his earlier films, and kinder to its lead.
The reservations cluster on the plotting. A number of reviews find the mystery overstuffed and the second half diffuse, with story threads left dangling; Variety and The Hollywood Reporter make this their central complaint. NME enjoys the first half and finds the second aimless. The sole outright dissent comes from Little White Lies, which sees only familiar jump scares and generic family trauma. The scores run from 40 to 90, a wider spread than the average suggests.
Damian McCarthy's third feature hones the Irish writer/director’s horror style to a sharp and terrifying point. It is a hair-raising, often exhilarating Irish horror tale.
Read the full review →The critic highlights smart plotting, nimble editing, evocative sound and Scott's frigid performance in an exceptionally chilling horror that blends artistic integrity with entertainment.
Read the full review →McCarthy makes good on his promise as one of contemporary horror’s most distinctive voices. The film threads the needle between old-school scares and a richly layered character piece that functions as a meditation on the filmmaker’s perspective as a storyteller.
Read the full review →The critic calls it potentially the scariest hotel horror since The Shining, with scream-inducing jump scares and stylish widescreen sequences. They single out the casting of Adam Scott and the effective suspense for praise.
Read the full review →The critic finds the film delivers a full evening of scares, chills, wicked jokes and haunted escape-room hijinks on top of an affecting personal quest. They single out the marvellously creepy hotel setting and some of the most gooseflesh-raising art direction in recent horror cinema.
Read the full review →The critic calls it a supremely creepy hotel-from-hell horror with strong atmosphere and jump scares, though the overstuffed mystery leaves some narrative loose ends.
Read the full review →
Oddity · not reviewed yetMcCarthy’s previous film: one house, one wooden man, and much better manners about plot.
The ShiningThe hotel horror everyone else is still checking into; the corridors have never been bettered.
The Innkeepers · not reviewed yetTwo bored staff, one closing hotel, and a slow build that rewards the patient.
Lake Mungo · not reviewed yetAustralian grief-horror in documentary clothes; quieter than Hokum and it stays with you longer.
The Wailing · not reviewed yetKorean rural horror where the village takes the supernatural as read, and so must you.
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