There may be no more fertile ground for screen horror than the enchanted woodlands of the Emerald Isle, which makes it disconcerting when Hokum — a title not entirely inaccurate — opens with a desert scene that’s like an outtake from Sirat. At least until Austin Amelio staggers into the shot in 16th-century conquistador armor, holding an ancient parchment with what appears to be a treasure map. That cumbersome framing device would be superfluous if not for some minor rewards at the end, marking the redemption of a troubled man and his hard-won self-forgiveness.
But it’s also symptomatic of the frustrations of writer-director Damian McCarthy’s diffuse script, which piles on story points and portentous symbols but fails to elucidate the underlying mystery. It’s a non-negotiable rule for any horror hotelier who wants a decent Yelp rating — or should be — that you don’t put a vengeful ghost in your honeymoon suite if you’re not planning on adequately explaining who she is and how she got there. Otherwise, it’s just, well, hag hokum, with a bunch of loose threads.
Hokum
The Bottom Line
Nothing the Irish tourism board need worry about.
Venue: SXSW Film Festival (Midnighter)
Release date: Friday, May 1
Cast: Adam Scott, Peter Coonan, David Wilmot, Florence Ordesh, Will O’Connell, Michael Patric, Austin Amelio, Brendan Conroy
Director-screenwriter: Damian McCarthy
Rated R,
1 hour 41 minutes
Adam Scott plays Ohm Bauman, a successful American novelist struggling with the epilogue for the final part of his series known as The Conquistador Trilogy. Seemingly at random after being unsettled by a presence while writing late one night, he takes off for Ireland to scatter his long-deceased parents’ ashes. For a guy whose name is practically a Buddhist chant, Ohm is tetchy, rude and disinclined to hide his American entitlement, alienating the staff as he checks in at the quaint old Billberry Woods Hotel.
His choice of lodgings is based on the knowledge that his folks stayed there on their honeymoon; the one photograph Ohm has of his mother (Mallory Adams) shows her leaning against a tree in the nearby forest, identified on the back in her handwriting as “the big redwood.” The circumstances of her death, just a short time after the Ireland trip, are at the root of reclusive Ohm’s misanthropic nature.
He gets off on the wrong foot with gruff hotel handyman Fergal (Michael Patric); has little time for the inane pleasantries of front desk clerk Mal (Peter Coonan); even less patience with Alby (Will O’Connell), a chatty bellhop who aspires to be a writer; and he snaps like an indignant Karen at crusty hotel owner Mr. Cobb (Brendan Conroy) for telling a story about an evil crone to impressionable children. Only the bartender, Fiona (Florence Ordesh), gets semi-civil treatment from him, which pays off when her concern saves Ohm from potential tragedy.
There are a lot of danger signals in the opening scenes — Mr. Cobb’s tale of a witch that takes lost travelers on a tour of the underworld; Fergal slaughtering goats with his trusty crossbow because they keep jumping on guests’ cars; dotty Jerry (David Wilmot) living out of his van in the woods, who recommends a swig of powdered magic mushrooms in goat’s milk to outrun the demons. Then there’s the mysterious honeymoon suite, which according to Fiona has been kept locked for years, since Cobb trapped the witch in there.
When Ohm returns after a spell in hospital, one staffer has gone missing since Halloween, Jerry is the No. 1 suspect, and the hotel is closing for the season. Still, Ohm finds a way to stick around, and when the honeymoon suite call bell starts ringing insistently, he goes exploring.
McCarthy, editor Brian Phillip Davis and composer Joseph Bishara keep the tension mounting as murky deeds come to light and Ohm finds himself trapped in a place where the past is coming for him. Looking increasingly grubby and haggard as the action wears on, Scott is appropriately rattled and desperate, resorting to a protective chalk circle for safety and a rickety dumbwaiter for possible escape — an effectively claustrophobic visual if not much more. The writer has both the living and the dead to worry about, not to mention his own tortured history.
While it’s a little low on scares, Hokum is pacey and involving enough to keep genre fiends watching once it hits streaming, just for production designer Til Frohlich’s creepy hotel set alone, a place that looks untouched by the passing years. But the writer-director smudges the lines separating an ancient evil from a sordid but disappointingly non-supernatural crime.
If you were expecting those dead goats being dumped in the forest, that redwood or a conspicuously featured bunny suit to amount to some kind of malevolent-nature payback, or the witch upstairs to be traced back to a living person rather than just your everyday demonic, chain-dragging ghoul, forget it.
Instead, we get a pointless return to the conquistador in the desert, a fictional story whose allegorical reference to Ohm and his childhood trauma is sketchy at best. All this does is intrude on an otherwise sturdy final scene between the novelist and the undaunted Alby, whose manuscript might be a new nightmare.
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