2026 | rated R | starring Adam Scott | written & directed by Damian McCarthy | 1 hr 47 mins | 4 1/2 out of 5 |
Season 10 Premiere!
After achieving a cult status with his debut film Caveat and hitting it out of the park with Oddity, my favorite film of its year, writer/director Damian McCarthy returns for another supernatural mystery, similar to his previous films in that it’s a mix of real human and supernatural horror, but also similar in that it’s another elegant, tightly-scripted, richly constructed piece of storytelling, that happens to also be about things that scratch around in the dark. Hokum is McCarthy’s most accessible, crowd-pleasing film yet while retaining all of the director’s masterfully crafted horror sensibilities.
Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) is a horror writer working on his latest novel, when he ventures out to small Irish inn where his parents once honeymooned to spread their ashes. Mean and anti-social to the staff members, he eventually gets drawn into the mystery when one of them disappears. The investigation leads him back to the inn’s honeymoon suite, one that everybody says has been sealed up for years because, you know, there’s a witch in there.
Structured like his previous films, Hokum is as pleasurable a journey as is the destination. The movie unfolds in a series of perfectly paced and arranged reveals, sometimes in flashbacks, sometimes in small gestures that drop hints like breadcrumbs to where McCarthy is leading us. It is tightly scripted with almost every line and set-up in the first half paid off in the second half. Not a moment here is spared without advancing the film’s two interwoven stories: the mystery of the missing employee and the mystery behind Ohm Bauman, who is so astonishingly rude to everyone around him that the movie prodes us to wonder why. It is richly populated with a cast of colorful characters – the pest-goat hunter, the caring bartender, the creepy wheel-chair-bound Inn owner, the suck up desk clerk, the wannabe novelist, the mushroomed-out hermit hanging out in the woods who may or may not have murdered his wife. It’s great.
McCarthy doesn’t make horror movie that seek to scare and fashions a story around it. This is a character piece first, a mystery second and it’s all written in the language of horror. McCarthy’s horror isn’t cynical jump scares, misery porn or torture, it’s of the “spooky” variety and like Oddity, Hokum is set on All Hallow’s Eve. Not that it doesn’t indulge in its share of jump scares, but they aren’t the fake-out, pad-the-running-time kind; they are fun, elaborately set up works of misdirection. The James Wan jump scare machine kind. And they’re effective, framed by the film’s general dark but stylish visual Halloween aesthetic.
Adam Scott is terrific as Ohm. Scott has been one of those guys who seems like he got famous just by hanging around the right people (like Nick Kroll and Jason Mantzoukas), but with Severance and now Hokum, he’s proven to be a more versatile actor than I thought. Ohm is unlike any character he’s played before, and he hits it all with the right level of snark, obnoxiousness and cynicism but with enough life and curiosity to make you wonder what’s going on with this guy instead of immediately hate him, which is easy. Hokum is Ohm’s journey with his past trauma and that’s it’s to the credit of McCarthy that story is the most fashionable and tired trope in horror right now and he found a wake to make it fresh, layered and nuanced enough that I came away satisfied. Where “Elevated Horror” uses trauma as a monster metaphor to wallow in, Hokum teases it out as part of the mystery.
Hokum is a lot like Oddity in the best ways. The tight story, the trust in the audience, the unique characters and the way it unfolds like a carefully orchestrated clockwork. It hits just the right notes and cements McCarthy as a unique voice in movies today. Loved it.