Damian McCarthy’s latest film “Hokum” is a solid genre flick filled with dark mood and details to be admired and appreciated. While it surely evokes countless other similar horror films about haunted places, it has its own distinctive elements to observe and enjoy, and the overall result is another interesting work from its undeniably talented director.

Adam Scott, who has recently been more prominent thanks to his Emmy-nominated lead performance in Apple TV+ drama series “Severance”, plays an American novelist named Ohm Bauman, and the movie begins with the ongoing writing process on Bauman’s latest work. He is quite determined to make the ending as bleak as possible, but then he finds himself haunted by something associated with his past, and then he eventually goes to some rural area in Ireland.

After he arrives at an old local hotel, we get to know the purpose of Bauman’s visit. This is the place where his parents, who died many years ago, went for their honeymoon, and he actually brings the two containers which contains his mother’s and father’s ashes, respectively. We later see him putting them inside the hole in a certain big tree in the forest not so far from the hotel, and we come to sense more of his troubled state, which is probably associated with some trauma involved with his parents’ death. 

However, the hotel does not look like a particularly good place for him to stay. Although it does not feel that ominous compared to that coldly creepy hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” (1980), the hotel is rather moody in old-fashioned ways, and Bauman notices that a certain place in the hotel is heavily locked down. He later comes to learn that this place, which was originally intended a big suite for honeymooners, has been regarded as a haunted place by its aging owner and his employees, and the owner, who is incidentally a wheelchair-bound cranky old man, really believes that nobody should go there because something really dangerous is inside there.

 Needless to say, Bauman is skeptical about this, but, of course, he subsequently finds himself more associated with this supposedly bad place. I will not go into details for not spoiling any fun for you, but I can tell you instead that 1) Bauman comes to care a lot about one of those hotel employees after one sudden incident and 2) he later comes upon some other dark secret inside the hotel besides whatever is lurking somewhere inside that ominous suite.

Once its hero finds himself trapped inside its main stage for horror, the movie slowly and carefully accumulates a moody sense of dread and anxiety across the screen, and it also shows some wry sense of dark humor as its hero gets cornered more in one way or another. No matter how much he tries to find a way out, the situation feels all the more hopeless for Bauman, and the movie toys with that particularly during one suspenseful scene where he struggles to alarm a certain character on the outside. In addition, his mind somehow becomes more and more disturbed, and the movie serves us a darkly humorous moment as something deliberately pushes him into facing more of what he has been desperately trying to look away from

Before eventually shifting itself onto the full-throttle mode during its last act, McCarthy’s screenplay prepares enough ground for its drama and horror. With its realistic rural atmosphere and a little freakish folktale, the movie sets the ground for what will be eventually unleashed onto the screen later in the story, and it also adds a bit of colorful human touch by an eccentric dude who happens to befriend Bauman early in the story. As the plot progresses, we get to know more about what makes Bauman tick, and we come to have some more understanding on him.

As the troubled human center of the movie, Scott gives us a complex human figure to observe and then empathize with. At first, Bauman comes to us your average self-loathing jerk who just happens to be a fairly good writer, but Scott did a subtle job of conveying to us the emotional wounds buried behind his character’s rather abrasive appearance, and the story often feels like a sort of twisted therapy session for Bauman. In the end, he has no choice but to face not only whatever scares him from the outside but also what has really been eating him from the inside, and we naturally come to brace ourselves more for what may happen to him in the end.

Several main cast members surrounding Scott ably fill their respective spots around him. While Florence Ordesh provides a bit of precious warmth to her certain scene with Scott early in the story, David Wilmot brings some dopey humor to the story as the aforementioned eccentric dude, and Peter Coonan, Michael Patric, Will O’Connell, and Brendan Conroy are also effective in their supporting roles.  

 Overall, “Hokum” is another enjoyable genre work from McCarthy, who previously gave us “Caveat” (2020) and “Oddity” (2024). After showing considerable potential in “Caveat”, he ably moved onto “Oddity”, and then he successfully advances further here in this film. In my inconsequential opinion, he deserves much more attention than before, and I think we can have some expectation on how far he will advance after the commendable success of his first three films.