‘Hokum’ Review: Damian McCarthy’s Folk Tale Mines Horror from the Tensions of Creation

Writer-director Damien McCarthy has spent three films quietly carving out a unique niche in an increasingly homogenized horror landscape. With his feature debut, Caveat, and its well-received follow-up, Oddity, McCarthy firmed up his voice as a fright stylist with morality tales steeped in the atmosphere and folkloric spirit of his native Ireland. If those two sturdy genre exercises were a little too small in ambition, McCarthy’s third feature, Hokum, makes good on his promise as one of contemporary horror’s most distinctive voices, threading the needle between supplying old-school scares and a richly layered character piece that also functions as a meditation on McCarthy’s own perspective as a storyteller.

Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) is a popular novelist who retreats to Ireland after completing the manuscript of his final novel in his Conquistador series. With his parents’ ashes in tow, he checks into a remote inn where they once honeymooned, planning to spread them in a nearby forest before taking his life. But Fiona (Florence Ordesh), the inn’s barkeep, intervenes. Weeks later, after recovering in the hospital, Ohm returns to the inn to collect his effects and apologize to Fiona, only to learn that she’s gone missing—a disappearance that may be connected with the inn’s honeymoon suite…and an ancient witch purportedly sealed inside.

The film’s long out-of-bounds honeymoon suite is McCarthy’s answer to The Shining’s Room 217, and it gives the filmmaker ample opportunity to indulge in his characteristic love of vintage objects and curios, from ghostly tube televisions to heart-shaped key rings and novelty clocks. Drawing inspiration from E.C. comics and classic Gothic literature, the film boasts the sort of puzzle-box narrative that McCarthy favors, with an old-fangled supernatural mystery entangling the characters in a complex web of superstition and past wrongs.

But by grounding this particular yarn in Ohm’s traumatic background and his toil as a novelist, Hokum feels more substantial than McCarthy’s previous efforts. All of the filmmaker’s signature obsessions are present and accounted for, but there’s a more personal, impactful story that exists marginal to them, unfolding within the man at its center. This can make Hokum’s guiding enigmas, its ominous dumbwaiters and uncanny donkey men, feel a bit random and undernourished, but the film’s emotional climax is a powerful one.

The film boldly realizes Ohm’s struggle with himself through his fiction as depicted in bookended sequences lifted from his manuscript, and where his creative vision begins and what it develops into is a profound depiction of the power of art to bury or rescue the one who creates it. It may be too pat to call Ohm a proxy for the filmmaker, but with Hokum, McCarthy declares who he is as a creative, coalescing his love of knotty narratives and cursed bric-a-brac around a guiding theme that resonates: In the absence of supernatural entities to reset the moral arc of the universe, we mortal beings must write ourselves out of our own bad endings.