Hokum

It’s also a fitting name for a supernatural horror movie, especially one designed to turn skeptics into believers. A title like that isn’t without its risks — you can easily imagine unimpressed viewers dismissing Hokum as just that — but the reward proves worth it in this case. Irish writer/director Damian McCarthy’s chilling third feature follows the mononymous trend of his first two, Caveat and Oddity, while challenging viewers by expanding his narrative and thematic scope rather than merely preaching to the choir.

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Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) likes to think of his work as challenging, too. A successful novelist on the verge of finishing the concluding chapter in a trilogy about a conquistador, he nonetheless feels stuck both personally and professionally. Hokum is bookended by different visions of how Ohm’s novel might end: in the desert, with its hero contemplating a horrible act in order to close the circle on his journey. Fiona (Florence Ordesh), a friendly barkeep whom Ohm tells about his proposed ending, disagrees with the author’s assessment — it’s bleak, not challenging.

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Perhaps she’s right. After scattering his parents’ ashes in the woods adjoining the Irish inn where they honeymooned decades earlier, Ohm unsuccessfully attempts to hang himself. He’s discharged from the hospital a few weeks later and quickly learns that Fiona, who cut him from his noose, has since gone missing.

As tends to be the case in these stories, the vibe is off from the start. A goat lies dead in the hotel parking lot when Ohm checks in, and the groundskeeper who killed it (pests, he claims) warns him to “go home while you still look like your passport picture.” It’s hard to feel too bad for Ohm, however. He declines to sign a copy of his book for the receptionist’s daughter and refers to a fan seeking advice as an “oblivious charisma vacuum.” And yet we don’t delight in his misfortunes in part because he soon emerges as seemingly the only normal person in a 50-mile radius.

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Plenty of horror movies wink at their audience as they tell us that sometimes bad things happen to bad people. Hokum does something better. It reminds us that the scariest forces in the world exist beyond such petty dichotomies as good and evil and are thus utterly unconcerned with the moral makeup of their would-be victims. In Hokum that force may or may not be a witch haunting the very honeymoon suite where Ohm’s parents celebrated their nuptials, which has been locked up for years and where he’s about to spend one very long night against his will.

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The film arrives in theaters this week courtesy of Neon, which has established itself a home for ambitious horror fare in recent years. The distributor’s highest-grossing domestic film is the Nicolas Cage-starring Longlegs, and in the last two months it has also released Undertone and Exit 8. (Even more impressively, Neon has distributed six consecutive Palme d’Or winners: Parasite, Titane, Triangle of Sadness, Anatomy of a Fall, Anora, and It Was Just an Accident.) Hokum easily ranks among the company’s more accomplished genre offerings, the kind that suggests we should have been paying attention to its director all along and have much to look forward to from him in the future.

Plenty of horror movies wink at their audience as they tell us that sometimes bad things happen to bad people. Hokum does something better.

Every room Ohm steps foot in is haunted, though not necessarily by witch or any other supernatural entity. His demons have followed him across the sea and aren’t interested in being exorcised anytime soon. Scott, who excels at playing just this kind of standoffish yet charming character, is the perfect leading man to bring McCarthy’s dark sensibility to life. Ohm is more of a sheep in wolf’s clothing than the other way around, and Scott’s performance is further proof that the Severance star has always had more range than his early (and excellent) work in comedies like Party Down and Parks and Recreation allowed him to display.

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The first question to be asked of a horror movie is whether it’s scary. The second is whether it also happens to be a good movie. The answer to both as regards Hokum is a resounding yes. It’s scary in a close-your-eyes-and-look-away-from-the-screen kind of way, using classical haunted-house tropes to tell a story that feels steeped in folklore yet bracingly new.