Hokum is the third feature from Irish writer-director Damian McCarthy, after 2020’s Caveat and 2024’s Oddity. The latter was a critical hit at festivals, and given modern Hollywood’s enthusiasm for drafting directors in to helm reboots or sequels at the first hint of acclaim, it wouldn’t have been a surprise to see McCarthy take on an American production with a more generous budget this time around. Mercifully, he has stayed close to home in County Cork, using his increased profile to instead lean further into his existing preoccupations, albeit with slightly more elaborate set design and an internationally recognisable star in Adam Scott (Severance).

Scott plays Ohm Bauman, a successful author of genre fiction living alone in a beautifully designed and appointed, but very gloomy, home somewhere in the States. Book sales and plaudits have done little for his mood or liver. Feeling itchy with guilt and sadness at the death of his parents years earlier, Bauman decides to embark on a solo trip to Ireland to the Bilberry Woods Hotel, where they once had their honeymoon, taking with him two urns full of their ashes and an unfinished manuscript about conquistadors.

It’s not clear what Bauman was expecting from a quaint Irish inn like the Bilberry. Everything about the modest ensemble of quirky guests, well-meaning staff and local customs seems to rub him the wrong way. He quickly reveals himself to be the kind of complete prick that having a dead mum and dad can’t really excuse. There’s also something wrong with the honeymoon suite that has apparently been decommissioned, a pretty damaging loss of square footage for a regional venue of this size.

As with McCarthy’s earlier films, the narrative has a pulpy shagginess to it that the viewer can either choose to embrace or rankle against. Plot points are layered in thick, some are seemingly excess to requirements, and there are other aspects of McCarthy’s style that can take adjusting to. The performances walk an unusual line between naturalistic and knowingly campy, and the visual aesthetic is simultaneously a tightly considered world with thought exuding from every square inch of screen, and also undeniably reminiscent of a Sunday night BBC drama.

What’s hard to argue with is McCarthy’s skill at building an atmosphere, holding the audience in tension and then snapping it, often in genuinely terrifying ways. Once the horror gets rolling all of the technical elements of Hokum cohere impressively. The hotel’s geography is laid out with great clarity via Bauman’s wilful or accidental explorations, keeping the audience oriented to his plight, and the combined work of the cinematography by Colm Hogan (who also shot Oddity) and the lighting team to produce the possibility of dread in every corner is hard to oversell. There are patches of pitch-black darkness in otherwise lamp-lit rooms here that John Carpenter and Dean Cundey would be thrilled to be credited with. The lean analog sound design too deserves credit, not a ding of a bell wasted.

Ultimately what makes Hokum and McCarthy’s work in general exciting in the current moment is the prioritisation of carefully crafted fear and a unique cinematic identity over tidy plotting or heavy-handed thematic overlays. Which isn’t to say the plot isn’t interesting or that there isn’t an emotional resonance, just that his films feel refreshingly freed from some of the more heavily trodden ground of modern horror cinema, which I would argue more than makes up for the odd unnecessary twist or turn along the way. I hope he continues on this unsettling Irish gothic path for as along he can still find new creepy buildings in West Cork to film in.

 

Hokum opens today in Australian cinemas.