And just like that, we have another Horror star in our midst. Damian McCarthy’s Oddity has stayed with me since I saw it a couple years ago, a small budget one set dark magic trick of a movie. Neon clearly loved it too, giving McCarthy a little more money and a star for his latest. Hokum continues McCarthy’s ascent up the horror ladder, proving more money means more quality filmmaking without more headaches. Just cooler haunted houses.
In this case the haunted house is actually The Bilberry Woods Hotel’s honeymoon suite, deep in the Irish countryside. Visiting there is Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) a famous author known for great, but bleak, stories. Which is why Ohm’s at the hotel: to spread his mother and father’s ashes in the last place where they were happy. Task done, it’s time to drink himself silly, where the owner’s son in law Mal (Peter Coonan), busboy/aspiring writer Alby (Will O’Connell), and bartender Fiona (Florence Ordesh) fill Ohm in on the Bilberry’s supposed supernatural history and why the honeymoon suite is locked up. That eerie Halloween night land Ohm in the hospital; when he comes back to get his things as the Bilberry closes for the season, Mal tells Ohm that Fiona has gone missing, and hasn’t been seen since his hospital stay. Even weirder, the local recluse Jerry (David Wilmot) insists that he saw at least some version of Fiona one night in the hotel, pointing directly at the honeymoon suite like some sort of ominous invitation for Ohm and Jerry to investigate.
By the description, you’d think Hokum would just feel like your standard trapped in the haunted house movie. But Damian McCarthy is much more interesting than that. He turns the Bilberry into a twisted fusion of haunted house and escape room. Yes the house is haunted, but it’s also hella big with many secrets, meaning Ohm’s little discoveries reveal new parts of the building to explore, hide, and get trapped in. This frees McCarthy up to scare the sh*t out of everyone in a claustrophobic, but multi location backdrop. Meaning, the scares come in all sorts of ways: enclosed spaces fears, excellent use of dark and shadow jump scares, creepy imagery through veils and TV screens, locked doors, and a deeply unsettling third act location that reminds everyone to just never go to remote locations with weird people everywhere. McCarthy’s scares aren’t all supernatural either, he mixes up who the threat is, scene to scene. Throw in some Irish folkore into the proceedings, and we’re now watching some sort of timeless fable. This locks the audience in, making them hyper aware of their surroundings as Ohm goes deeper and deeper into what feels like a hell he never knew existed.
Adam Scott seems like a strange choice to play the lead if you only know him from Parks and Recreation. Ohm is something new from Scott, using Ben Wyatt’s sharp wit but with a much darker, self loathing tinge. Even Scott’s innate likability cannot keep us from hating this ahole, no matter how broken his life clearly is, with that magnetism transforming into the audience kinda rooting for the Irish folkore to consume him. That being said, Scott does a great job keeping us engaged as thing around him get stranger and scarier, but ground us in the jerk author Ohm inhabits. Like all great horror films, it’s the character actors that rise to the occasion to make Hokum great, in this case giving us new interpretations of classic archetypes. I particularly loved David Wilmot’s kooky Jerry, arguably the most understanding character despite making his own liquid mushrooms to drink. I’d never seen Florence Ordesh before, but she casts a large shadow over her part as Fiona, arguably the little humanity inside this film which needs it desperately. And Peter Noonan nails the Irish version of a famous 1996 thriller character, trapped in his little life desperate to break out of it with no real capacity to do so.
Each Damian McCarthy movie has gotten a little better as his star has shone brighter. Next is clearly the A24 version of Hokum, whatever that may be. Then we get the Blumhouse money, where hopefully the real sparks fly, leading to the obvious: Aunt Gladys from Weapons takes on whatever unholy creation becomes Damian McCarthys Best, versus Allison Williams from Get Out, in a battle for horror supremacy. Aunt Glady and McCarthy’s baddie will be formidable, but never count out the privileged Karen who uses corrupt systems to her advantage, eating her skim milk cereal along the way.