Director: Damian McCarthy
Stars: Adam Scott, Florence Ordesh, David Wilmot
That perennial favourite the crone continues her unrelenting, cackling rampage through modern horror, perpetuated this time by Irish scaremaster Damian McCarthy, who already managed to build some hubbub with prior features Caveat and Oddity. Neon have given his new flick Hokum a similar promotional spin to the one Longlegs was afforded two years back, cultivating a certain air of expectation based on some ecstatic early pull quotes, a few stark images and very little else. Given that Osgood Perkins’ flick turned out to be pretty great, this has somewhat set Hokum up for a fall, particularly as it’s most startling imagery has already been blown by the teaser trailer. Sorry guys, there’s nothing here that tops that insane-looking bug-eyed rabbit dude looming toward us. Indeed, much of McCarthy’s trick bag is decidedly over-familiar. Dial back expectations for innovation accordingly.
But don’t give up entirely, because there’s fun to be had here. Terminal grump Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) is the author of a successful series of fantasy novels stuck on how to bring his series to a fitting conclusion. Haunted by a past trauma (of course), he decamps from the States to Ireland, visiting the hotel his departed parents once stayed in so as to scatter their ashes and maybe, just maybe, find some inspiration. In spite of his professional work, Ohm has no imagination whatsoever, so he chides at the local stories of witches and ghosts that dog the Bilberry Woods Hotel. Mean to everyone he meets, he nevertheless receives good graces from staff member Fiona (Florence Ordesh), who gets him out of a particularly abrupt jam. When she then goes missing, Ohm feels duty-bound to help investigate.
A good portion of this plays out in pedestrian fashion, enough to cast doubt on those ecstatic early reactions. McCarthy feathers in a few patience-testing jump scares and “it’s behind you!” gags, along with stock, overused visual motifs (circles, mirrors). He flits with changing up the resolution for a creepy dream sequence (Scott Derrickson recently beat him to the punch there), but this is only trifled with the once. Hokum is frequently guilty of such dalliances without follow-through. The same could be said of the hellish bug-eyed rabbit-man, or the motivations behind hotel manager Mal’s (Peter Coonan) complicity in the mystery. It all comes to feel a bit patchwork.
The whole is saved from damnation by the dark and involving back half, which effectively puts Ohm in an escape room from Silent Hill. Searching for Fiona in the hotel’s supposedly cursed Honeymoon Suite, he finds himself trapped in a pleasingly elaborate arena of evil; interconnected rooms (and floors) that he must apply wits to survive. McCarthy brings the light levels right down, demanding that we peer into his gloom, and there are enough unpredictable elements to finally create the sense of suspense that the movie has previously miscalculated. Ohm’s only external hope is local oddball Jerry (David Wilmot), a magic mushroom loving crank with whom he shares a darkly kindred past.
McCarthy’s penchant for aping the memeified Relaxing Car Drive video is among his most frustrating tendencies and, as intimated, there’s an amorphous sense of over-familiarity to both the threats and the (anti)hero’s narrative arc. If you wanted to distil the tropes of modern horror down to one movie that collects together all the disparate trends, Hokum might just be your nexus point. The busy centre of your Venn diagram. It’s fortunate for the film that there’s an undertone of caustic humour. One character here receives the most ironic screen death I’ve encountered in a while. I had to restrain myself from bursting out laughing. Such episodes at least encourage us to have fun with the otherwise dour and trundling boilerplate material.
The Lost Highway Hotel 