The success of the TV show Severance seems to have woken up the weird in Adam Scott, who used to make more films like Damian McCarthy’s Hokum back in the day. Which is to say – small-scale, offbeat, the path less trodden, relying on mood and atmosphere to do the storytelling.
He plays a writer called Ohm Bauman who goes to Ireland to scatter his parents’ ashes in the place where they honeymooned and winds up in a nightmare, possibly of his own making. There’s a bit of Stephen King in here – the blocked writer invaded by his own dark imagination – but also Tarkovsky in the poetics of the film’s assemblage. David Lynch maybe – the big rabbit costume which turns up at one point may be lifted from Lynch or Donnie Darko’s Richard Kelly (who, incidentally, has not made a film since 2009’s The Box!).
Ohm is the unit of resistance, as any studious kid will tell you, and writer/director McCarthy is clearly playing games with his main character, as well as playing games with his audience. Is this horror or is it a crime drama? If it’s horror, what sort of horror is it? And if crime drama, who killed the unfortunate who looked early on like they were going to be a significant part of the film, but winds up being significant only as a corpse?
Acute, relentless, all-smothering atmospherics delivered via a remarkable attention to detail is the offer here. McCarthy first paints us a picture of hero Ohm, then gives us a thumbnail sketch of stereotyped Ireland – craic and poitin – before almost immediately switching things up a bit. Magic mushrooms make an early appearance. There is a goat standing on a car because it’s tripping. A bellboy at the funny old hotel where Ohm is staying is dressed in a ludicrously old fashioned bellhop outfit. An eerie tale is told about a witch locked in one wing of the rambling place, in the Honeymoon Suite, to which access is strictly forbidden. And so Ohm naturally goes there, up in a creaky old lift.
McCarthy keeps switching about point of view, keeps shunting the timeline and also throws in odd plot turns – an unexpected suicide early on, to complement the unexpected death of the person who might have been significant.
I’m being coy because the film is more than a story, but also because the story does add up to something. Ohm Bauman came to Ireland to get some resolution in his life, to give it a relaunch, and that’s what he gets, just not the way he was hoping.
Hokum would probably have been better appreciated if it hadn’t arrived about the same time as Exit 8. Both are existential exercises in following an individual in a tightly constrained environment, though McCarthy’s is a much more swagged and festooned affair than the austere Exit 8.
For whole chunks of time there is no dialogue, just Ohm in the hotel trying to get to the bottom of things, which might all be taking place in his own mind. McCarthy fills in the gaps with a claustrophobic soundscape, as he did in the impressively stylish Oddity in 2024, introduces shadowy ghosts here and there, gives the camera a playful swing now and again, almost as if it were an accident, which it obviously isn’t. Every second of this film is framed the way the director wants it.
Through this feast of woozy atmospherics, Scott remains our everyman battling against the unknown, finding allies who might be enemies in the shape of Jerry (David Wilmot), the wild guy who lives in the woods, chatty receptionist Fiona (Florence Odesh), weird wheelchair-using hotelier Mr Cob (Brendan Conroy), helpful manager Mal (Peter Coonan) and Fergal (Michael Patric), the aggressive handyman. Lovely, precise performances by all. Though really the hotel is mostly empty – shades of Kubrick’s The Shining, maybe?
Is there really something up in the Honeymoon Suite? Is it significant that Halloween occurs while Ohm is visiting? Yes and yes, obviously. Nothing more need be said, except that Hokum is very obviously not hokum.
Hokum – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
