Horror continually mines the dark crevices between belief and skepticism. Explorations of witchcraft, folklore, and the paranormal are fertile grounds for character-building, so that a believer might lose their faith, a heretic might see the light, or a doubter might be convinced. A film like Hokum, Damian Mc Carthy’s third feature, quite literally lives in those gaps. Its title has a variety of closely related meanings, though the most obvious is “nonsense,” which sets up the film for a losing internal battle that sees complexity and sincere emotional heft struggle to surface above lazy contrivances and psychologizing.
The chief skeptic in the film is Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott), a bitter novelist who travels to the remote Irish countryside to scatter his parents’ ashes. His lodgings for the week are a quaint inn with deep sentimental value — his parents honeymooned there before he was born. It’s a peculiar little establishment whose staff both boast and forewarn of a child-luring witch that lives in the now permanently locked honeymoon suite. The hotel staff appear fully bought into this “hokum,” as Ohm dismisses it while sipping on yet another glass of whiskey. Fiona (Florence Ordesh), the friendly bartender, is perhaps the biggest believer of them all, though unlike Alby (Will O’Connell), the awkward bellboy, she’s never seen the witch.
Mc Carthy casts a convincing sheen of weirdness over his native Irish setting. The owner of the inn is wrinkled and obsessive, and the local hermit Jerry (David Wilmot) drinks magic mushroom-laced goatsmilk and lives in a van. In this insular community, friendships and close family relations — the maintenance man with half his cousins in the police force, or the hotel manager who’s the decrepit owner’s son-in-law — determine, for good and for bad, how you move through the world. As an outsider, Ohm’s welcomeness only goes as far as his cruddy attitude takes him and Irish hospitality tolerates his prying.
Unsurprisingly for a horror movie, Ohm (a German, rather than Irish, name that better describes the film’s droning and intrusive score) is dealing with his own demons, particularly the death of his mother when he was a child — the cause of which, like many things, Mc Carthy signals loudly in the film’s first act. After getting drunk at the bar and burning whatever bridges he had erected in his short time at the hotel, Ohm attempts to hang himself in his room, discovered just in time only after the thoughtful Fiona returns his tape recorder and photograph of his mother in the middle of the night.
Ohm wakes up to more than one mystery a few weeks later. Crucially, Fiona is missing and Jerry, the hermit, is the unofficial number one suspect. Jerry is convinced Fiona is trapped in the honeymoon suite, having seen a vision late at night when he tried to break in. He enlists Ohm’s help, but is captured and beaten up by the front desk man, Mal, before he can get up there, leaving Ohm by himself to solve the crime and conquer his demons.
Mc Carthy imagines an effectively creepy inn, with ancient bowels underneath that are perfect lairs for all manner of supernatural, mythic forces. What’s disappointing, and characteristic, about Hokum is how clearly he telegraphs his scares and thematic concerns. A witch flashes on screen or the decaying spectre of Ohm’s mother wafts through the frame with predictable regularity. The cheapness of these repetitive appearances is not that they’re drawn out by the viewer’s prior knowledge of horror movie rhythms, but that Mc Carthy does almost nothing to subvert them.
Our attention turns instead to a more practical set of events, like Ohm’s inventive methods of getting in and out of the hotel’s basement through a dumbwater, or signaling his distress through the bell at the front desk. A turning point comes when he makes use of a piece of chalk to draw a line around the bed in the honeymoon suite while the witch stalks him, sparing his life at least until the next morning. It’s the first indication that Ohm is willing to unravel his ways of seeing the world away from the clenched fist of his heart and mind, a willingness that serves him well against the evil witch and the emotional baggage regarding his parents.
Additionally, one wonders what bearing the strange prologue and epilogue — a dramatization of Ohm’s latest novel about a man and boy lost in the desert — has on the rest of the film. It’s the most nakedly funding-contingent piece of fluff you’re likely to come across this year (Hokum has the support of Film Image Abu Dhabi), only vaguely gesturing toward themes of guilt and feeling thoughtlessly grafted onto the story. These bookending bits hang on the film like Jerry’s mangled arm and leg after escaping Mal’s clutches; fleshy and useless, you wish you could rip them off and get on with the things that matter.
What does matter is where Ohm ends up. Is he a believer, is he not, or has he been lodged in the crack between the two? Mc Carthy attempts to construct some ambiguity around these questions, though most of it is explained away by magic mushrooms rather than deepened by complex introspection or philosophical inquiry. The result is flimsy, a little nonsensical, and not very challenging. In other words: hokum.
DIRECTOR: Damian Mc Carthy; CAST: Adam Scott, David Wilmot, Florence Ordesh, Peter Coonan; DISTRIBUTOR: NEON; IN THEATERS: May 1; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 47 min.
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