‘Hokum’ review: for good and ill, this haunted hotel chiller earns its title

Well, they were really asking for it with that title, weren’t they? With jump-in-your-seat scares, supernatural silliness and a hodgepodge of spooky cinematic references, Hokum is a bubbling Irish stew from West Cork-born writer and director Damian McCarthy. He throws everything into the pot: local folkloric tales of an evil witch, a magic mushroom-gobbling oddball who lives in the woods, a basement that holds dark secrets. The first few slurps go down a treat, but ultimately the clashing flavours overpower one another. Sometimes less is more, y’know?

Ohm (Adam Scott) is a successful American author who’s pitched up at the Bilberry Woods Hotel, a creepy establishment in rural Ireland. He’s arrived to scatter the ashes of his parents, who honeymooned here decades ago and always longed to return. Before even stepping foot inside the place, he’s encountered a strange apparition and a dead goat. Upon check-in, he finds an old man regaling random young lads with a hair-raising story about the aforementioned witch. Ohm chastises the auld fella, who intones: “There are worse things out there than strangers, yank.”

So it proves. The author, a curmudgeon who’s breathtakingly vicious to a bellboy (Will O’Connell) with dreams of becoming a writer, nevertheless strikes up a rapport with Fiona (Florence Ordesh), another staff member. When Fiona goes missing, Ohm makes it his mission to find her. All fingers point towards wood-dwelling Jerry (David Wilmot), who insists he’s had a vision that suggests her fate may have something to do with the hotel’s eerily sealed-off Honeymoon Suite.

All of this bubbles along pretty nicely for the movie’s first half. McCarthy has said that Hokum “doesn’t take itself too seriously” and indeed he pulls off a good balance of chills and gentle laughs. O’Connell manages to convey his character’s darker side without making him too dislikeable, so it’s all the funnier when Ohm – whose patience is thin at the best of times – encounters the local weirdos. References to The Shining (the overhead tracking shots of Ohm driving through the Irish countryside, the woman in the haunted room) are a little on-the-nose, perhaps, but do set the film’s enjoyably parodic tone.

Alas, things start to go awry when Ohm finally gets into the Honeymoon Suite. Until then, we’ve seen shadowy glimpses of the witch, with the movie teasing her grand reveal – tension that has carried the story so far. Perhaps something really horrifying happened in the editing room, but the film soon earns its title in the worst way.

A murder mystery collides with a haunted hotel horror until one of them is pretty much forgotten about, resulting in a narrative that feels frustratingly aimless. It actually becomes slightly difficult to make out what’s going on, given that two of the supporting characters are so similar and underdeveloped that it’s hard to tell them apart. And as for the ending: we won’t spoil anything, but the dreaded words “it was all a dream” come to mind. Still, a few of the jump scares are ruthlessly effective and, with its cartoonishly gothic tone, Hokum does what it says on the tin.

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