There might be something in the air in Ireland. It’s in the water and the soil too. Despite being surrounded by an endless, rugged sea of green, or perhaps because of that emerald desolation, it is a land marked in the popular imagination by centuries of hardship and sorrow. Some would even claim it’s haunted.
The Gaelic wellspring of fairies and changelings, and from whose shores authors like Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde emerged, alongside the banshee and Dullahan, is a source of elegiac fiction. Here the magical and bitterly real mingle, often with a despairing wail. And early in Damian McCarthy’s Hokum, the misanthropic, lonely scribe Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) seems likewise drawn to these dreary charms. After all, he is an author himself, albeit of a yankee disposition; the grandson of the Irish diaspora, Ohm has returned to his forefathers’ country to mirthlessly toast “bleak endings” while finishing his next book at a hotel at the end of the world. So imagine the delight when he’s teased by his bartender that this inn also is said to have a witch. No, really. The owner keeps her locked in the abandoned honeymoon suite upstairs. And it’s been locked off since time immemorial.
As a sucker myself for tales of the doomed and damned, this is where I too leaned forward—and never had a reason to sit back again in what amounts to a pleasantly macabre bit of campfire hokum from an Irish filmmaker in his element.
As the director of the cult darling Oddity, McCarthy has developed a sizable following ahead of only his third feature. Yet while Hokum certainly picks at heightened (or “elevated”) themes of guilt and regret in its portrait of a man given to loving the miserable company of one—and a writer who in turn is even more pitiless to his fictional creations than McCarthy might be to his own—Hokum is very much a late night ghost story that a few hundred years ago would’ve been shared on Christmas Eve beside candlelight. Indeed, the film is bathed in shadows and mystery, as well as the recognition that there really is a witch upstairs, and what it wants is nothing that can be mistaken for liberation or empowerment.
Owing perhaps more debt to Stephen King’s The Shining than Kubrick’s, Hokum fixates on a deeply troubled novelist who imbibes too much Scotch and bourbon. So rude is Scott’s Bauman when he is in his cups that it is a wonder the hotel staff can put up with him for a day—luckily Florence Odesh’s Fiona shows enough kindness to him that she saves him from a particularly bad night before All Hallow’s Eve (or Samhain as the Celts would’ve called it in pagan times).
So when Fiona goes missing from the hotel—and after confiding in Bauman that she always was curious to poke around the allegedly witched honeymoon suite—sympathy gets the better of wisdom as the yank likewise finds himself going into the private chamber. Even when lit with what might be hundred-year-old electric light, the gloom of the place is nothing short of oppressive. It’s a space filled with bad dreams and worse waking hours.
The pleasures in Hokum emanate from its pulp. There are moments of superbly atmospheric dread wherein a soaked and abandoned Scott hides behind a Victorian bed curtain while the countenance of a creature hovers outside. Similar to Oddity’s use of the creepiest mannequin to ever crawl out of Hell’s department store, it is the belabored shots of eerily smiling cherubic statues on the the bridal suite’s clock, or of Edwardian figurines the hotel owner uses to frighten small children in the lobby, wherein Hokum earns its bite.
Less successful are the ubiquitous jump scares, which while sometimes effective, are often telegraphed and used liberally to a fault. The subtextual thesis of the film also about how even an artist’s pain can be destructive to the art feels at times a wee contrived; a fig-leaf to the modern expectations for “serious” horror cinema.
To be sure, Hokum is seriously good, but mostly when it embraces its fairy tale qualities about dark forgotten corners of the woods where spirits seek to still carry off the un-careful child of God to heathen ends. The film seeks to find a light outside of the misanthropic bleakness which can bedevil even rolling hills of beatific green. But, really, we are all here to enjoy the dark, which in McCarthy and cinematographer Colm Hogan’s compositions, is invitingly nihilistic.
Hokum premiered at SXSW on March 14. NEON releases Hokum in wide release on May 1.
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