Hokum
When best selling author Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott, TV’s ‘Severence’) travels to Ireland to scatter his parents' ashes, he stays in a hotel which everyone knows is haunted, but despite his increasingly nightmarish experiences, Bauman thinks it's all "Hokum."
Laura's Review: B
Irish writer/director Damian Mc Carthy returns to the supernatural murder mystery set in an ancient, spatially interesting space that worked so well for him in “Oddity,” this time not with one female victim but two. “Hokum” forges a new path with a male protagonist who, rather than being out to solve a mystery, instead finds himself on a psychological journey where a detour to the dark side plunges him into that role when the woman who saved him goes missing.
Mc Carthy begins by plunging us into the book Bauman is currently writing, the end of his Conquistador Trilogy, and the place he is taking his Conquistador (Austin Amelio, ‘The Walking Dead’s’ Dwight) and the young boy (Ezra Carlisle) with him on a desert treasure hunt reflects his troubled state of mind. As the Conquistador tips his empty waterskin to his mouth, we cut to Bauman sipping from his ever present glass of whisky, the ring the glass has left on his writing desk echoed on the desert floor (circular rings will be a theme here). Bauman appears to be in a basement and when he hears a noise, tilts his desk lamp towards it, but he doesn’t see the old woman hovering behind him. His attention will be drawn, though, to a picture of his mother (Mallory Adams, “The Other Lamb”) with a redwood tree and two cylinders containing his parents’ ashes, inspiring him to visit their honeymoon spot, Ireland’s Bilberry Forest Hotel, to scatter them.
As he pulls into the old Gothic hotel’s lot, he’ll question why one of its employees, Fergal (Michael Patric, “The Quiet Girl”), has apparently shot a goat with a crossbow. Fergal explains that the goats climb up onto the cars and are too aggressive to shoo away. In the lobby, Bauman will note an old man scaring two little boys with tales of a local witch and advise them to go find their parents. Turns out Mr. Cob (Brendan Conroy) is the hotel’s owner and the check-in clerk Mal (Peter Coonan) confirms the man’s story, calling bellhop Alby to confirm his sighting outside the closed off, haunted honeymoon suite. ‘Hokum,’ mutters Bauman. Although recognized, the author will continue to make a bad impression, becoming testy with Fiona (Florence Ordesh) when she helps him find his room and actually burning the hand of Alby (Will O'Connell) later at the bar when the man dares to suggest he’s a writer too. Heading out into the woods, Bauman finds the tree in his photograph, carefully trickling his mother’s ashes around its base before dumping his dad’s, then being surprised when Jerry (David Wilmot, “The Guard,” “Calvary”), an old man sitting on a log with the corpse of that goat from earlier, asks him who they were and offers him a drink of what looks like milk. Bauman asks for something stronger and is handed a flask, but Jerry explains that the white liquid contains his special ‘mushroom powder,’ made from the same local fungi that cause the goats to climb on cars to look at their reflections.
After a night of heavy whisky indulgence, Bauman awakens in the hospital, Fiona having saved him from himself when she went to his room to return his portable recorder and he didn’t respond, but when he returns to the hotel to get his things, he finds it being closed up for the season and learns Fiona has been missing since the hotel’s Halloween Party. Gerry is convinced she’s in the honeymoon suite and the two plan to return at night to see if they can find her.
Mc Carthy and his cinematographer Colm Hogan (“Oddity”) use the hotel’s spaces for maximum effect, its traditional lobby framed by two winding staircases housing a miniature tableau of children and the local witch, its basement housing a series of bell pulls, the Honeymoon Suite’s inexplicably ringing. The honeymoon suite is roped off, a gated elevator and special key providing access and the suite is full of nooks for things to hide in and a large dumb waiter controlled by a clockwork that goes to a basement tunnel which appears to be unconnected to the hotel itself. Bauman, with only a flickering lantern, will investigate it all, finding multiple horrors and Hogan captures it all so that we can see, even after the lights go out.
Scott shoulders the film with an arc that explains, then atones for, his self destructive tendencies, and while we can easily guess the cause of his inner turmoil, it is forgiven in a moving scene. Support is solid all around, Ordesh making enough of a mark for us to care about her fate, but it is Wilmot who rises to heroic challenges despite his reduced circumstances. The film’s climax may have you shouting at the screen (‘throw something through the window!’) but Mc Carthy gives his film such a satisfying wrap, he leaves you wondering if Bauman was right in the first place.
Neon releases "Hokum" in theaters on 5/1/26.
