‘You need thicker skin than that to be a writer...’
The issue with haunted hotel movies is that Stanley Kubrick already made the definitive one in The Shining and nothing will ever compare to it. 1408, another Stephen King adaptation and one that absolutely terrified me when I caught it in theatres in 2007, was another variation on this theme. Hokum very much follows in the same tradition, even (unwisely) explicitly referencing The Shining a few times (as well as A Christmas Carol, weirdly). That being said, despite being derivative of other (better) films, I still found much to enjoy in Hokum…
Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott), a successful but troubled writer, retires to The Blueberry Woods Hotel in rural Ireland to finish his latest novel, the third in his successful Conquistador trilogy, and to lay his parents’ ashes to rest (they honeymooned at the hotel many years previously). Anyway, he shows up, the big-shot American writer in a remote Irish village, and starts being a dickhead to everyone. Mal (Peter Coonan), the desk clerk, and Alby (Will O’Connell), the bellhop, seem to have something to hide, a strange man is living out in the woods and taking mushrooms (played with affable enthusiasm by David Wilmot), and Cob (Brendan Conroy), the owner of the hotel, is convinced that he has trapped a witch in the long abandoned honeymoon suite. Hotel bartender Fiona (Florence Ordesh) appears to be the only sane one left (as a former barman of some esteem myself, I can confirm this is often the case).
Irish writer-director Damian McCarthy has already proven himself to be adept at creating a terrifying and singular visual language with his last film Oddity (a simple Google image search for that film will attest to this), and Hokum is similarly visually inventive. McCarthy subtly uses negative space and slow tracking shots to create a hotel that becomes a visual maze for both our protagonist and the audience. Scott, an actor who has already proven himself to be adept at playing someone trapped in a maze in Severance, is great again here, particularly in the first third of the film. While some of the horrors that the Blueberry Woods Hotel hides behind its doors and down its narrow corridors feel a little arbitrary, they are always chilling, and the film successfully coasts by on atmosphere alone in the moments in which the plot is a little thin and repetitive.
I’ve seen some prominent people in the horror community claiming that Hokum is the best horror film of the year so far. In a year that has boasted The Bone Temple, Obsession and Backrooms, this feels like a pretty spurious claim, but while it leans too far into its influences at times, it’s still a good time at the movies.
