Hokum Review

Directed by Damian McCarthy

Deep in the desert lies waiting the most powerful substance in the known universe, the spice… Wait just a minute, this isn’t about Dune! Let’s shift focus into the opening scene of the first film of my Spooktober blog extravaganza, Hokum. Yes we are indeed in a desert, in Abu Dhabi, (I’ve been there! Check out my photos here) where we are presented with two storybook characters. A Don Quixote conquistador type and a scruffy-latino boy (no not me). As they wander through the desert in exhaustion from the unrelenting sun, the conquistador strips his armor and leaves his sword behind because he will definitely not need it later. Alright, enough of this, Its all happening in the mind of a writer, typing away at his keyboard in a poorly lit concrete box, his home. This is our supposed protagonist Mr. Ohm Bauman, portrayed by none other than Adam Scott. You may know him from Severance, the 10 Emmy Awarded Apple TV+ show that the corporate “turtle-neckers” blessed us with in 2022. However, this show was not my first encounter with Adam Scott. The first encounter with his acting was back in 2008 and from then on, I always remember him as the 3rd step brother in the raunchy comedy starring Will Ferrel and John C. Reilly, Step Brothers. Since then I always associate him to the character in that movie, consequently, I always picture him portraying a douchebag and that’s exactly the role he has in Hokum, the film I’m reviewing. Hokum is directed by Damian McCarthy an Irish filmmaker, who is also known for Caveat and Oddity. The latter was the first movie of his that I’ve seen and to my personal taste Oddity was an almost perfect horror movie. With this notion, I went into Hokum with very high expectations and I’ll proceed by saying that I was a bit let down. my rating is 7/10 and I’ll proceed to tell you why right after I rant about McCarthy’s career for a few sentences. His career officially started back in 2020 with the release of Caveat which received from what I’ve read on the internet a decent amount of positive feedback and which I’m still inclined to watch. Before this, McCarthy was an electrician and making short films on the side, which in all respects makes me respect the hustle even more so. Nothing that I love to see more than a person who having a normal  nine to five job still makes time for passion projects, so kudos to them. Im no expert on the movie director topic but what I do know is style and he has a very unique one. In a genre that is already so convoluted and almost impossible to avoid falling into tropes, his films stand out for his touch of original Irish interpretations of overused themes. Before I move onto the review I’d like to mention that it contains spoilers and an interpretive summary, if you haven’t watched the film, I don’t recommend you continue reading. Or do, who cares.

Fiona: "Are you lost?"

Ohm Bauman: "What does it look like?"

Fiona: "Well with that attitude, you can stay lost."

The story follows a writer who has two deceased parents, whose ashes he keeps in two cylindrical wooden urns. From the first five minutes of the movie we get a pretty classic jump-scare, a shadowy women in a doorway, the writer shines a light. What do you know? The women is gone.. Actually she's right behind you, boo! Also important to mention, as a cinephile you always pay attention to when a camera pans to a random object, in this case a revolver in a wooden box which is shortly revealed to be important to the plot. Now we are in Ireland on Hallows Eve, land of the hobbit like green scenery and beers. Mr. Ohm is driving to the Bilberry Woods Inn, a significant place where his parents spent their honeymoon. He has come here for two reasons, to scatter his parents ashes at the roots of a big redwood in the vicinity of the Inn and to finish his novel. After he completes the first of these tasks, he encounters a homeless man drinking milk in the woods, Jerry; a sketchy but seemingly harmless guy aside from the fact that he is drinking milk laced with psilocybin, a hallucinogenic compound. Drugs always add a nice touch to a horror film, if used correctly… Skip to the night and we find Mr. Ohm at a bar talking about his novel and childhood to the bartender at the Inn, Fiona, who he clearly has a romantic interest for. She mentions that the honeymoon sweet is haunted and that she has always been curious to go up and see (the “Witch”) for herself but the key to the elevator is always on the Innkeeper. Ohm makes a rookie mistake of telling her that she reminds him of his mother and goes on to show her a photograph of her next to the redwood. He tells her how his mother died young from a gun shot wound to the face and how his father (an electrician, like our director) followed soon after by drinking himself to death. This conversation, which is revealing of key background knowledge, is cut sort by the bellboy, Albi who is starstruck by the writer and Is trying to pitch his own writing. Instead of respectfully asking him to let him grieve alone, Ohm heats up a spoon on a jack-o-lanterns flame and burns Albi’s hand. This is where our protagonist begins to flourish into the aforementioned douchebag. This douchebag proceeds to get shitfaced at the bar, leaves for his room forgetting his tape recorder. Fiona being the likable type finds it and is worried of the state that Mr. Ohm left the bar so she ask Albi, the bellboy to open his room so that she can return his recorder and check in on him… And the door creaks open, Fiona reaches for the light, flick.. and Ohm is hung by the neck from the ceiling fan. They manage to save his life. After the attempted suicide, the story really begins to lose momentum for me and I’m not sure if its because how predictable it is or due to the fact that what drew me into the movie is nothing but a side story of the fictional world of Hokum. Which by the way if you are curious as to what the hell it means, here you are; Pretentious, non-sense, or tricks used to get a cheap emotional reaction. In foresight, it’s actually a very suitable title for what this film made me feel, I found myself wanting more and felt that I was somewhat tricked into believing something more terrifying was to come. And that something was Jack The Jackass, not only was this what grabbed my attention in the trailer but I was wholly expecting it to be the central horror element of the film. This animal-human hybrid is exactly the kind of thing that can best be described by uncanny valley. Which is an eerie feeling experienced from seeing something not quite human. From this point on my summarization is done. Whats left is my grievances and some of the aspects that were redeeming to the story. Here they are;

“I guess just in terms of the design, it came from Pinocchio, the idea of the half boy, half jackass when they started to turn.”

“Yeah, so it's Jack. Jack the Jackass. I guess in the context of the story, it was a kid's TV show that Adam's character used to watch as a child, and it was playing on the TV when something terrible happened. And I think it's just the idea that this innocent childhood thing is now warped into something that's haunting him and following him and he associates with a really bad time. It's also just a way to kind of work in exposition in a kind of a horrifying way.”

- Damian McCarthy

The downfall of Hokum is it stumbles into over-predictability and lack of imagination in its climax. The setting and the acting is not a major part of this issue. The opportunities to make more with what they had was there. They had literal woods to play with and decided not to do anything spooky in the woods besides Jerry drinking milk. Jokes aside, who decide it was a good idea to show our protagonist fall asleep twice in the haunted honeymoon suite. And as far as a haunted goes, give us a little more of a backstory, don’t just throw in a brief tale of a bride gone mad. Is the bride even relevant to this story? No, we just get a classic cheater douche scheme of, “I don’t want to tell my wife I’m cheating and got my co-worker pregnant so I’m gonna feed her to the witch”. And this so called witch is not a very scary or convincing one to begin with, I've seen scarier ladies at Walmart with probably more kills (just kidding I hope). I had all my hopes bundle up in Jack the Jackass to make his terrifying appearance towards the end. This was probably why I felt robbed when the credits started to roll and all I had gotten was a static tv screen on a creepy kids show. At least he bullies Mr. Ohm, The successful writer who was a shitty kid and now carries around his unresolved trauma like a hunchback. The characters, including Adam’s become somewhat flat after the suicide, every step they took was set on a course that was upright obvious and lacked any kind of mystery. But even this mere fact seemed intentional, as if there was some kind of irony in the character each fulfilling a morbid role. McCarthy deserves credit for mustering up an uncanny horror aesthetic, even though it promised so much more than it could deliver. I’m by no means going to let this movie discourage me from watching his others, many reviews state that Caveat is the scariest of his other films, so it is on my list. I’ve vented my frustration with the film, let me tell you what it did to deserve a solid seven. Undoubtably, by now you probably think my rating is rather high for having so many grievances, but what saves this film from being completely ruined boils down to two great characters. A dead Fiona dressed as a reindeer stuck in the dumbwaiter and Jerry our beloved doper homeless/pro-euthanasia hero. These two characters keep the movie rolling, in different ways but both perpetuating a kind of naiveness mixed with awareness that the others lacked. Must’ve been the  special milk; “All these things exist but people with closed minds just cant see them”. All the while Mr. Ohm similarly afflicted, wallows on his impending doom and cries about killing his mom when he was a kid. Their ability to make the viewer hate him is perfectly executed as a despicable protagonist, who you almost hope doesn’t make it to the end. The character of Mr. Ohm is portrayed just as intended by Scott Adams, even if many other reviewers have questioned his inability to break a window, I think he does exactly as his skeptical character would’ve done. And then there’s the suspicious groundskeeper, who seems somehow complacent with the evil which haunts the Inn, but is slowly revealed to be a good guy who just doesn’t like rude Americans in his country. As I near the end of this review, I want to thank you for taking the time to hear what I have to say. In conclusion, I have nothing left to say but that this film is not perfect but it’s still worth a watch.