Anyone familiar with Irish filmmaker Damian McCarthy’s work already knows he’s one of the most exciting new names in horror. His underseen debut Caveat was a moody ghost story that showed off his ability to create unnerving imagery and unbearably tense sequences, but it was his terrifying sophomore feature Oddity that put him on the map for genre fans. After making one of the scariest films in years, it comes as no surprise that McCarthy got the attention of a company like NEON, which hopped aboard for his latest feature Hokum. It’s McCarthy’s biggest production to date and further boosted by Adam Scott taking on the lead role, all of which suggests Hokum would give its director plenty room to conjure up more unforgettable scares. Instead the film is more like a remix of McCarthy’s prior features, retreading ground with a heavier hand and constituting an underwhelming experience.
It’s especially disappointing when McCarthy’s strengths are still evident throughout Hokum, even if they’re in short bursts. Much of what made Caveat and Oddity a breath of fresh air in contemporary horror was how their stories rooted themselves in folklore and mythology. Current trends let metaphor and allegory take the driver’s seat, but this comes with the tradeoff of making the horror too individualized to its characters. Villains tend to come across as bespoke obstacles for protagonists to overcome in order to resolve inner conflicts, which in turn makes the stories self-contained—save for broad, foregrounded themes like grief and trauma. In McCarthy’s films, spirits, witches, and curses are very real, their existence irrespective of the characters who just so happen to cross paths with them. And while characters have their own troubled pasts and dark secrets, the dividing lines between our world and the next are clear.
It’s a back-to-basics approach for horror storytelling where we’re reminded of a spiritual realm beyond our understanding that can doom us to a horrible fate if we find ourselves within its grasp. In Hokum, not-so-poor soul Ohm Bauman (Scott) is a successful yet miserable author who, in the midst of a writer’s block, decides to scatter his parents’ ashes at an old, secluded Irish inn they had fond memories of visiting. He is, to put it mildly, an asshole to the staff from the moment he arrives, and as a skeptic he scoffs upon learning the hotel owner keeps the honeymoon suite locked up to contain a witch trapped inside. Needless to say, it’s only a matter of time before Ohm’s curiosity gets the better of him, and he soon ends up trapped in the honeymoon suite with the witch eager to take his soul.
Hokum takes its time to establish the different characters around Ohm’s orbit while doling out bits of backstory about his troubled childhood and local lore. It’s the kind of exposition McCarthy uses to set the mood for frights to come, but for every spooky story or ominous hotel decoration (courtesy of production designer Til Frohlich, whose work is one of this film’s best assets), the screenplay adds clunky telegraphing and signposting to overstate certain ideas. When Jerry (David Wilmot), a drifter who lives in the woods and consumes magic mushrooms, rambles to Ohm about psilocybin bridging our world with the afterlife is too obvious as foreshadowing and a statement on Hokum‘s attitude towards supernatural.
Making matters worse is the screenplay’s bookending attempts to give Ohm a sort of redemptive arc: an on-the-nose glimpse into his mind as he imagines the possible endings of his new book. As much as Scott can play a jerk like slipping into an old pair of jeans that still fits, Hokum‘s handling of his character arc is too underwritten and schematic to succeed. These kinds of frustrating choices continue throughout, creating a snowball effect as different plot threads fizzle rather than tie together in any satisfying way. If anything, these aspects do more to bog the film down when it should be ramping up.
Granted, McCarthy’s directorial skills are usually strong enough to bypass the more contrived aspects of his writing. Caveat has a strange set-up—someone offers a man a babysitting job on the condition that he’s chained to a wall so he doesn’t wander anywhere he shouldn’t—but that arbitrary limitation leads to some terrific, nerve-rattling scenes. And while Oddity has a psychic twin, an unsolved murder, a corrupt asylum psychiatrist, and a wooden golem in the mix, it all comes together to make some of the scariest moments in any film from the past decade. Hokum has a few well-done jump scares, and its recurring image of a demonic entity named Jack will surely haunt people’s nightmares (and kudos to McCarthy for exercising more restraint around Jack than the marketing), but most of its scares are too repetitive to land. The sight of something moving out-of-focus in the background or a pale face emerging from the dark might work the first time, but McCarthy goes back to the same well so often that it creates diminishing returns. This is all the more disappointing after seeing how well McCarthy used a single, cavernous room in an old manor in Oddity, where something could always hide in or around a dark corner. That mastery of navigating a single space kept things unpredictable; Hokum’s reliance on the same bag of tricks boxes itself in from making good use of its location.
Those who haven’t seen McCarthy’s prior features may find Hokum a fine-enough introduction to his sensibilities. But his third riff on someone trapped in seclusion with an otherworldly presence is beginning to suggest the formulaic, especially when this particular riff doesn’t do much to build upon what he’s done before. Rather than certify McCarthy’s status as a new master of horror, Hokum reaffirms his potential, and what should have been a step up serves more of a slight misstep.
Hokum opens in theaters on Friday, May 1.