Starring Adam Scott, David Wilmot, Florence Ordesh

Directed by Damian McCarthy

Black Bear/Neon – in Cinemas now

An American writer of cult historical sagas visits the Irish hotel where his deceased parents spent their honeymoon to scatter their ashes, dismissing the rumours that the building is haunted by a witch as hokum…

It’s a brave filmmaker (that’ll be ‘brave’ in the Yes Minister sense of the word) who has the cajones to call their movie Hokum. Talk about tempting fate. But it’s to writer director Damian McCarthy’s credit that he did. This is a deceptively skillful 107 minutes of horror cinema.

As the story kicks into gear, the cinemagoer can be forgiven for thinking that we are in conventional, rather old fashioned and even ‘hokey’ haunted house folk horror territory. But when the extended opening act ends with a truly surprising character left turn for our central protagonist, Ohm Bauman, it’s time to sit up and pay attention. Indeed Ohm (surely no coincidence, also a unit of resistance), as played by the brilliant Adam Scott (of Severance fame) is in some respects doubling as an emotional antagonist, and we can see the complex inner journey on which he must embark in order to purge the poison from his writing, and his soul.

Having set us on this course, McCarthy takes the story away from horror in some respects. The middle act is actually a domestic thriller of sorts – as Ohm searches for a missing barmaid, Fiona (Florence Ordesh) – before the two genres are brought together with the help of Jerry, the crazy guy from the woods, off his head on magic mushrooms, believably and engagingly played by an excellent David Wilmot.

So is the hotel really haunted by an ancient Irish witch? I couldn’t possibly comment, but McCarthy’s resolution to the question driving the horror engine of the story is an ingenious one. And like all the very best horror, the answers actually lie within the protagonist’s quest to find emotional peace. Speaking as a writer who has often attempted to resolve my personal issues – consciously or unconsciously – through my professional scribblings, I found the end point of Ohm’s journey to be both truthful and genuinely moving.

I do have a quibble with Hokum though. Jump scares. They’re tedious at the best of times, but this is a movie that really, really doesn’t need most of them, as it makes such good use of shadow and ambiguity. But there are so many, I wondered whether McCarthy had been pressured to up the jump scare quotient. On the rare occasion when something supernatural happens without the soundtrack going nuts, I found it ten times spookier. Note for next time, Damian… less is more.

Verdict: This caveat aside, Hokum is a worthy addition to the horror canon – full of love for the genre and for its fully rounded characters – giving its many scary moments genuine emotional value. Absolutely not ‘Hokum’ at all. 9/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com