For those looking for a good, old-fashioned horror story, feast your eyes on Hokum.
The folk horror film, directed by Damian McCarthy (Oddity, Caveat), starts off deceptively simple. It has all the classic horror tropes: a wailing ghost, a mysterious death (or multiple), and a curmudgeonly hero — the writer Ohm Bauman (played by a perfectly cast Adam Scott) — grumbling “Hokum!” at the thought of anything spooky. Ohm has made his way to the dark, bleak forests of Ireland to finish his equally bleak novel and spread his parents’ ashes, so he has no time for silly ghost stories, thank you very much.
The only problem is that Ohm has walked straight into one of those ghost stories, or, in his case, the story of a witch. He’s checked into the Bilberry Woods Hotel, which has long locked up its honeymoon suite to protect guests from the nightly wanderings of a hungry witch, ready to shackle bad little boys and drag them straight to hell. Everyone from the superstitious hotel owner to the bellboy (who claims to have seen the witch with his own eyes) tells him to stay away from the chained-up door, but like any classic hero of the genre, Ohm must see the horror for himself.
But just as you’re about to completely buy into the existence of ghosts and witches, McCarthy makes a sharp pivot and throws his protagonist into the middle of a murderous whodunnit. Fiona (Florence Ordesh), the only hotel staffer who warmed up to Ohm’s prickliness, has gone missing. There are suspects involved, and a few red herrings that point to a more rational explanation for Fiona’s disappearance. However, the honeymoon suite calls to Ohm, and when he finally bangs its door down, he finds himself trapped in an escape room where he must use his wits (and a very handy piece of chalk) to survive the supernatural forces trapped inside with him.
There are a lot of moving parts toHokum, but it’s best to focus on Scott and his performance as the famed but pained author. “The goal was to tell a simple story with a complicated character,” said McCarthy in an interview with Collider, and Scott more than delivers on that complexity with Ohm. Despite starting off the film as an asshole, quick to bully the hotel’s staff and drink whisky in solitude, Ohm eventually opens up and reveals more and more layers to himself. He has his own ghosts following close behind him, both real and unreal, and his anger comes from years of keeping his own grief close to his chest. In the hands of anyone else, that grief could have easily come off as cheesy or overdone (because aren’t most horror movies about grief, anyway?), but Scott knows exactly how to redeem his hero and have us rooting for his escape by the end.
Although McCarthy has never been known to end his horror movies on a high note (his heroes are never completely good and they all get their comeuppances in the end), Hokum sees the director turning over a new leaf. Despite calling Hokum a simple story, McCarthy has made sure to set up a number of complicated hoops and loops for his protagonist to jump through in order to earn his escape.
Hokum is currently screening in Philippine cinemas.
