Hotel hell: "Hokum"

Damian McCarthy's Hokum marks an altogether eccentric revival of horror cinema's "stranger in a strange place" subgenre. The stranger is Adam Scott's Ohm Bauman (strange name, even), an obnoxious, barely functioning alcoholic horror writer who, one Hallowe'en, repairs to a hotel in rural Ireland where his late parents honeymooned so as to scatter their ashes in the nearby woods. That task, at least, is easily achieved; far trickier is extricating himself from the deeply dysfunctional hostelry, plagued as it is by tripping mountain goats, a no less cranky, wheelchair-using owner (Brendan Conroy) and a rumour said honeymoon suite has since been sealed off so as to contain a witch. Belatedly, and only after pissing off everyone around him in some way, Bauman comes to realise he's wandered into a missing-woman mystery with a twist on every other page; also that he'll have to ditch the booze and work extra hard if he's to arrive at a happier outcome than the generally doomy conclusions of his own hack novels. By naming his film as he has, McCarthy has afforded himself a get-out clause: sure enough, Hokum's penny-dreadful plotting does feel rattly, outright arbitrary in places, and never meant to be taken too seriously. The tension here, whether dramatic or comic, stems from the contrast between the upright, arrogant Yank - Scott doing just enough to suggest Bauman might be less of an asshole if he weren't navigating such a rough period - and the kooky Irish character actors looming up over our hero as he descends into darkness: Peter Coonan as the hotel's desk clerk, Will O'Connell as a dullard bellhop and David Wilmot as a local itinerant. McCarthy demonstrates an eye for unsettling symbolism (handsaws and crossbows, clay figurines that pre-empt the plot, a haunted-seeming carriage clock with a hidden, secondary purpose, half-glimpsed images on poorly tuned TV sets), while production designer Til Frohlich works overtime converting a shabby provincial hotel into a combination of escape room, puzzle to be solved and Dante's Inferno. I suspect this is one of those scripts that got the greenlight the moment 2024's Heretic went past a certain number at the box office: if it's neither as cunning nor as engrossing as that film, instead relying overly on the sight of Scott squirrelling around in the dark, it delivers a measure of baroque fun all the same. Primary takehome: some men would rather undergo supernatural trial-by-fire in remote Irish hotels than book themselves into therapy.

Hokum is now playing in selected cinemas.