Damian McCarthy has a real talent for crafting creepy, atmospheric horror films that are as simple as they are terrifying. His previous film, Oddity, was an unsettling murder mystery taking place in a house in the remote Irish wilderness. It was simple, horrifying and deeply unsettling. With his latest feature, Hokum, he is working in that same lane, but you feel him refining his craft, becoming more confident with every unsettling frame.
When novelist Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott, Severance), retreats to a remote inn to scatter his parents’ ashes, he is consumed by tales of a witch haunting the honeymoon suite. Disturbing visions and a shocking disappearance forces him to confront dark corners of his past.
From the opening moments of, Damian McCarthy immediately immerses you into the uneasy atmosphere of the Billberry Woods Hotel. When goats are not destroying peoples cars or guests getting high on mushrooms, there is something off within the hotel, and it is not the dated interior design or its isolated location. The honeymoon suite is locked behind a metal gate with a guard present at all times. The owner of the hotel claims that there is an ancient witch imprisoned in the suite that will claim the souls of anyone who stays the night. Ohm believes it is nothing but hokum, until Irish folklore stops feeling like folklore and starts closing in on him. With a larger budget at his disposal, McCarthy leans into the single-location setup and turns it into something genuinely haunting.
As with all of McCarthy’s previous work, his horror thrives in atmosphere, ambience and tension. Hokum is no different. The cinematography is drenched in dark, gothic undertones. The production design is the right amount of grime to make your skin crawl. And the sound design does the rest as every creek, every distant thud, and every pin-drop of silence is dialed in to keep you on your edge. It all adds up to an unnerving atmosphere where the darkness feels like it will pounce on you at any moment.
And when it pounces, you will definitely jump out of your seat. A lot of the scares lean into jump scare territory, but McCarthy knows how they actually work. Once Ohm is trapped in the honeymoon suite, he investigates searching for a way out, much like a video game. At first it was just a dark, dirty room. Yet once the claustrophobia, the suffocating darkness, and those distant moans start to wear him down, his reality begins to slip and panic sets in. McCarthy stretches this tension to its breaking point and once it snaps, it delivers some of the most effective jump scares in recent memory.
Yet for all of the horror Hokum gets right, it does start to feel a little too familiar. This is the second time where McCarthy has built a story around a protagonist investigating a mystery in a single location. Though the source of the horror has shifted from a wooden puppet to a dirty hotel room, the feeling of deja vu is hard to ignore. Furthermore, he attempts to add layers to Ohm, played brilliantly by Adam Scott, by giving him a tragic backstory. He is an alcoholic novelist who is bitter and will lash out at just about everyone because he hasn’t processed a traumatic event that happened in his childhood. The problem is that this story doesn’t really click into the film narrative. You could strip that entire thread out and the film wouldn’t lose anything.
Overall, Hokum is another solid reminder of what McCarthy is one of the best indie horror directors working today. He has perfected the genre of haunted house horror. He is a master of tension building and the utilization of silence in a singular room. While the film does feel a bit too familiar and narratively is a bit of a mess. But when the film works, it is hard not to break free from its simple yet incredibly effective horror.
My Rating: B
Hokum comes to theaters May 1st.
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