Crew
Director/Screenplay – Damian McCarthy, Producers – Derek Dauchy, Mairtin De Barra, Julianne Ford, Roy Lee, Steven Schneider & Ruth Treacy, Photography – Colm Hogan, Music – Joseph Bishara, Visual Effects – MBF Film (Supervisor – Dan Cullen), Special Effects Supervisor – Aidan Byrne, Makeup Designer – Niamh O’Loan, Production Design – Til Frohlich. Production Company – Spooky Pictures/Tailored Films/Cweature Features.
Cast
Adam Scott (Ohn Bauman), Peter Coonan (Mal), David Wilmot (Jerry), Will O’Connell (Alby), Florence Ordesh (Fiona Crotty), Michael Patric (Fergal), Brendan Conroy (Cob), Austin Amelio (Conquistador), Ezra Carlisle (Boy)
Plot
Successful American novelist Ohm Bauman travels to The Bilberry Hotel in rural Ireland, the place where his parents met in order to scatter their ashes. Later the barmaid Fiona goes to Ohm’s room to return items he has left behind on the bar and senses something is wrong. She opens the room to find that Ohm has tried to hang himself. He is rushed to hospital. Released, Ohm returns to collect his things just as the hotel is closing for the end of the season but finds that Fiona went missing the same night she helped him. Ohm asks about the search for her. Jerry, a homeless man who lives in the grounds, believes she might be in the bridal suite, which is always kept locked and is reputedly haunted. Jerry obtains the keys to the bridal suite and Ohm enters – only to be locked in and abandoned there by Fiona’s killer.
Hokum was the third film from Irish director Damian McCarthy. McCarthy had first appeared with the horror film Caveat (2020) and then went on to make the very spooky Oddity (2024), which gained quite a reasonable word of mouth.
Hokum falls into a respectable lineage of haunted hotel films. The indisputable classic in the field here is Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). There have been a number of other reasonable works on the subject with the likes of 1407 (2008), The Night (2020), Night at the Eagle Inn (2021) and Shelter in Place (2021). Of these, the closest that Hokum falls is 1408, which had John Cusack trapped inside a haunted hotel room. We get similar scenes during the latter half here with Adam Scott trapped inside the bridal suite, although this expands out to also venture down the dumb waiter into a basement area and the entire film does not stay inside the hotel room as 1408 did.
There are some issues with the script for Hokum. It is never specified by the film what is haunting the hotel. Indeed, the supernatural element is overtaken by the activities of a very mundane killer and only comes in at the end. This leaves you with questions about who the figures in the basement are – are they the witch that is purported to haunt the room? The figures that Brendan Conroy talks about as Adam Scott arrives at the hotel? The pacing is slower than you might expect and the script takes some contortions that don’t always feel natural. Not to mention that in the early scenes, the film sets up Adam Scott as one of the most unlikeable lead characters I’ve come across in a film in some time.
Nevertheless, when Hokum gets going, Damian McCarthy proves himself one of the most promising directors currently working within genre material. He has a small mastery of peripheral jumps – of figures abruptly appearing behind Adam Scott or walking past in the background, the figure of the mother who suddenly follows Adam from behind a doorway. He certainly gets the nerves jangling on a number of occasions. There is fine tension that McCarthy manages to build during the scenes where the trapped Adam Scott tries to alert David Wilmot by ringing the bell. And it is this that lifts Hokum up out of an uneven screenplay and makes it work.
Trailer here