Hokum
Ohm Bauman is by nature a solitary person, a writer who works in the darkness of his home late into the night on the final passages of the conclusion of his Conquistador trilogy, a misanthropic tale of failure and disappointment echoing the trauma of his own life, his mother’s sudden death when he was a child and his father’s angry descent into drink and his own premature grave.
Their ashes standing sentinel on the mantelpiece, on a whim Ohm books a trip to Ireland to visit the Mulbery Woods Hotel where they spent their honeymoon, an attempt to return them to that moment of long-ago happiness which triggers only a deeper depression on Hallowe’en night, his life saved by receptionist Fiona whom he later finds was never seen again after she finished her late shift.
The third horror film from writer and director Damian McCarthy after Caveat and Oddity, while Ohm (Hellraiser: Bloodline’s Adam Scott) sneeringly dismisses the tales of the locals to whom he is indebted as Hokum he finds the corridors of the hotel harbour more than shadows, eager to see in the honeymoon suite where he believes his parents stayed but which has been locked for years and said to be haunted.
Vagrant man of the woods Gerry (David Wilmot) wanted for questioning by the Garda in connection with the disappearance of Fiona (Florence Ordesh), the hostility of the hotel staff, their refusal to open the locked gate to access the suite and their connection to the local officers leads both men to suspect that separate wing is where Fiona is hidden, something which they cannot prove without seeing inside.
Mixing ghost story, folk horror and supernatural thriller, Hokum follows in the tradition of out-of- season hotel horror from City of the Dead to The Shining, Ohm in a strange place and resisting what he is told but unable to deny that something is wrong from the moment he arrives to find a dead goat in the car park, Chekhov’s crossbow introduced early before being stowed in the back room, a grieving writer carrying his own demons to mingle with the local spirits.
Gerry claiming the unseen world can be glimpsed only by a mind opened through moonshine and magic mushrooms, believing in the Cailleach who chains and tortures those who cross her path, despite the title which implies shallow nonsense Hokum is meticulously crafted, effective in character, location, mystery and atmosphere, a grim tour of Ohm’s grief and the abandoned basement of the historic building which impinges on the underworld where dark things lurk.
Hokum will be on general release from Friday 1st May
