Words by JANE CROWTHER
When watching Damien McCarthy’s Irish folk horror it’s impossible not to think about The Shining – and that’s no bad thing. Stephen King’s creeper, and the movie from Kubrick, haunt the odyssey of a misanthropic, depressed and alcoholic writer, Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) who’s trying to crack the end of his bestselling trilogy and heads to the Emerald Isle to spread the ashes of his dead parents in a spot they apparently loved. Oh, and during Halloween. Though we see Ohm at home (and during the course of proceedings, in a hospital room) the tale essentially unspools as a bottle episode, confined to the environs of the dated and remote Billberry Woods Hotel. A chintzy, rustic place where goats high on magic mushrooms butt the parked cars, the proprietor tells children stories of local witches who lure victims to a hellscape below ground and the honeymoon suite is locked up to prevent some mysterious horror, it’s the sort of establishment most of us might shudder at and pull a u-turn in the drive.
But Ohm is a glutton for punishment. Harbouring psychological wounds carried from childhood and a mean streak a mile wide, he glugs whiskey in the bar, belittles and burns a fan bellboy and declares the barkeep’s assertion that a witch is trapped in the honeymoon suite as ‘hokum’. He’s just here to write and not engage in such nonsense. But all work and no play makes Ohm a dull boy. A dark night of the soul brings him close to the glimmer of death and sets him on a quest to find a missing woman (Florence Ordesh), investigate the suite upstairs and come to terms with demons – his own and those that lurk.
McCarthy’s set up ignores mobile phones from the get-go (no inelegant ‘oh, there’s no signal here’ nonsense, they simply do not exist) and builds a plan of the hotel for audiences to understand. The honeymoon suite is reached by a lurching lift, there are a series of cellars under the hotel, woods surround the property and the hotel is on the cusp of closure for the season. That leaves Ohm alone to battle what he finds upstairs, no staff or passing traffic. And what he discovers is genuinely unsettling – production and sound design combining to create a suite of nightmares, jump-scares deftly deployed to ratchet bpm. It’s impressive how terrifying McCarthy can make the drawing of a chalk circle in the dark or a rabbit TV show on a flickering screen. And the increasing compression of spaces is unpleasantly claustrophobic: scaling the action down from hotel complex to single suite, to a tight-squeeze dumb-waiter system and the corner of a dank cellar. (Definite Blair Witch vibes.)
Key to selling the scares is Scott – playing an asshole who deserves comeuppance, but with enough soul to deserve our sympathy and good will too. To see such a sardonic man who has no magic in his life understand the darkness at the edge of our physical world feels authentic, his catharsis earned. His unpicking of Ohm’s pain as he’s terrorised makes Hokum a satisfying horror: both thrillingly scary and emotionally resonant– might make you reconsider staying in a rural hostelry.
Words by JANE CROWTHER
Pictures courtesy of Black Bear/Neon
Hokum is in cinemas now
