HOKUM: The Unforgiveness of Trauma // A Lengthy Analysis
How Damian McCarthy recaptured true tension and rebuffed the tropes of "Hollywood Horror"
The following review of Hokum will be spoiler-free until it's not in which case, I'll warn you promptly.
It will also contain spoilers for Damian McCarthy's previous movies; Oddity and Caveat.
I'll be honest; the first fifteen minutes of this movie gave me real cause for concern. I'll tell you why I was wrong later but bear with me.
The Main Character
It's still spoiler-free. Don't worry.
Hokum begins with a writer sitting in an expensive, plush apartment by himself, drinking whiskey and being obliviously haunted. This sent a shiver down my spine. Not because it was scary but because it's just one of the worst tropes of all time:- Arsehole writers portrayed as rich and up said own arse.
He embarks on a trip to Ireland to get rid of his parents' ashes because you're supposed to connect that that is what is bothering him so much. Alongside this, he belittles everyone he meets apart from a little forest goblin man in a beanie who takes psilocybin who we've all met before if we've ever been in contact with the deep country in the UK or Ireland. I should make clear at this point that the protagonist, known as Ohm Bauman, is American.
Bauman witters on and on about his books to a bartender who works there and is unreasonably rude to a caricature of a desperate writer. You're supposed to feel at this point that this guy gets his comeuppance for not believing in witches in a horror movie where witches are mentioned in the first five minutes.
The problem I have (or had) with this is that writers, for some reason, are always portrayed as being pretentious dicknoses who aren't people persons but the truth is that writers have to be interested in meeting people for their job. You need to observing the world at all times. This portrayal is always from writers too; I sometimes wonder if that's just what they think other people think about writers. Having this false facsimile is perhaps more relatable even though it isn't true.
However, this character trope is redeemed almost immediately but I simply cannot tell you why without warning you that spoilers are coming beyond this paragraph. I'll just tell you that this time, Damian McCarthy got this character absolutely bang-on-the-money and I'm sorry I ever doubted you. He ends up being one of my favourite heroes in horror cinema and that avenue is not oft walked down. His arc is something of a Shakespearean tragic hero. This whole annoying trope is let off the hook.
This is your last warning.
I've been waiting to do this for ages.
From hereon out, there will be spoilers.
The Arc of Ohm Bauman
The waitress he spoke to earlier has a bad feeling about Ohm Bauman and decides to check on him and he discovers that he has hung himself which was a twist I don't think anyone was expecting. The movie really begins when he wakes up in intensive care and goes back to the hotel to find out it's closed for season and learns that Fiona, the bartender, found him and cut him down but has also been missing ever since.
Everyone Could Be a Suspect
Hokum succeeds where McCarthy's previous films have failed by creating a long list of persons of interest. Quite quickly - without imposing on the viewer - a lot of suspicious characters are in the fore.
Jerry - Forest Goblin Man, takes mushrooms, apparently killed his wife but insists his innocence. Fiona was reportedly last seen with him (even though we find out later that that isn't true but whatever).
Fergal - Weird Hunter-Janitor, self-proclaimed friend of An Garda Siochana (The Irish Police Force), threatened Ohm and multiple people with violence.
Mr. Cob - Eccentric old Irish man who believes in witches and is the owner of the hotel, has the honeymoon Suite locked permanently because he believes it's haunted by a witch. It could be an H.H Holmes-type situation.
Alby - Skittish employee, swears he had an encounter with the witch. You are also perhaps thinking of the tall tale of the bellboy from Oddity.
Ohm's Parents - His mother was apparently shot by a child who faced no consequences shortly after their stay at the supposedly haunted honeymoon Suite. It's posited that this may be the reason.
Mal - Mr. Cob's right-hand man and son-in-law.
Ohm, himself - There could easily be something we don't know about what happened after he was cut down. He may not remember or is an unreliable narrator.
That about covers it.
Ohm forges an unlikely alliance with Jerry who believes Fiona is dead because he saw her ghost whilst she was on magic mushrooms. Her spirit was pointing at the ringing bell of the haunted honeymoon Suite so in a metaphysical way, Jerry was the last person to see Fiona. Before you know it, Ohm Bauman is trapped in the Honeymoon Suite by himself, haunted by what he's done.
An Effective Use of Paranormal Horror
I'm a way bigger fan of ghosts and ghouls and hauntings when it's used like Silent Hill. If it illustrates a visual story to be told whilst being unsettling and uncontrollable, I much prefer that over "it's scary because it's a ghost and ghosts are scary". It suddenly becomes way less about the quest to thank Fiona for saving him and whodunnit but more about excavating Ohm's own demons and in a lot of ways, they are perhaps one in the same. We don't know how little time we have to be gracious to one and other and the time we have to pay it forward is slipping away.
Whilst Ohm is guilty for accidentally shooting his own mother when he was a child and has been masking that by pushing every single person away in his life, the price he pays isn't being trapped with a witch for 24 hours but this girl who was left to die for reasons unrelated will never know how much she has changed him for the better and it was something she didn't even have to do.
Ohm using the technique for fending off witches that she learnt from Fiona
I very much enjoyed the stage of the movie in which Ohm is trapped in the Honeymoon Suite. It felt like a bizarre, hidden zone where are their no rules anymore. There's not a lot of impressions of time passing, given that Ohm drinks himself to sleep when he gets there. Here, I felt that McCarthy returned to the isolating tension from Caveat that I loved so much. This time, the game of cat and mouse was played in one room. The crossbow even made a return.
Also similar to Caveat, a lot was made of just a few small props like the golf clock and the dumbwaiter - as seen in Outlast, The Shining and anything else with a big, old asylum/hotel. I like when they just let the brakes off. I felt very strongly with Oddity that I didn't have a vested interest in the safety of the doctor's mistress, the sister or what the big clay man was doing because there were no threats or consequences. Hokum fixes that by showing you both of those things almost instantly.
Whilst Hollywood-style, I feel like the haunted space retained a lot of charm.
Ohm's Catharsis
Where we end with Ohm's story is that he figures out to operate the mechanical bell at reception for the Honeymoon Suite to call for help. Jerry escapes from Fergal out the back of the van and limps all the way to the hotel after much protest from Mal, Fiona's killer.
That's right. For some reason, the movie just cuts to a scene that shows Mal drugging Fiona and taking her into the Honeymoon Suite to leave her to die. You then uncover that Mal had an affair with Fiona and she is pregnant with her baby. I thought this was telling for the intelligence of the story that the self-obsessed writer, the folklore sceptics and the dubious gnome-ish man who lives in the woods in a van and takes mushrooms actually had nothing to do with Fiona's disappearance.
You might think this would fall flat but I actually preferred the notion that the world doesn't revolve around Ohm's trauma. His struggle is personal and the planet has a lot of moving parts and it's not fair how things don't get wrapped up in a nice little package. This hotel and the people in it have their own struggles too. It's too easy to throw the dart at any of the aforementioned listed subjects and call it a day.
It all happens very fast but Mal and Ohm are trapped in this nebulous evil hallway with the witch whilst Mal tries to bargain for his escape after he set the whole building on fire to destroy the evidence.
The poetic justice is that Ohm knows to draw the ring around him with chalk so that the witch won't touch him. In this moment, the spirit of his mother meets him and they reconcile and make peace for what he did. Mal is chained and dragged by the witch into what Wikipedia.org describes as "The Underworld" which, I mean, I guess it was. It just looked like the swinging, porthole doors to manky kitchens that all gastro-pubs have in the UK. Except this time, there were a gaggle of the goopy shadows from Shin Megami Tensei.
Fergal finds him in the burning building and rescues him. He is in hospital again and is visited by Alby who's character is that he is a fanboy loser who wears a silly bellboy costume - that I don't believe exists in Ireland - despite being a grown-ass man with two jobs. Only then does Ohm decide he wants to read his manuscript for him and give him helpful advice on being a writer. It's also revealed at this point that Alby spiked his whiskey with psilocybin so Alby apologized for possibly making him want to kill himself. From Ohm's perspective, he is wondering that the psilocybin made him see all those visions and believe it just like Jerry did. Even though, he was in something of a coma after taking it so I guess we're supposed to leave the effects last that long.
As for the theory that it was all in his head, it would make the movie way more lame but it could make sense if you were the type of guy to watch Theory videos on YouTube all day. The dots do connect because Fiona and Jerry could've been missing for different reasons and Alby announces that "they were found" but nothing about them being dead. The issue with this is that Mal was never declared missing as a plot point in the narrative and it would be weird for Alby to assume that Ohm knows about any of this if he was asleep through all of it.
He refuses the gift of alcohol and so he turns a new leaf, re-writes a new, less bleak ending to his book, where hurt, manipulation and spite are no longer the answer.
Whilst I do somewhat resent the notion that writers are exactly like the subject matter that they write about, I'm satisfied with him being a more hopeful person for himself. I don't know if I needed the subtext of the book's ending being changed as a plot point.
The Witch, The Jackrabbit and The Mother
I do really like this film but I do have a very mild collection of issues I want to talk about. It's less a knock on the creativity of the writer but more an indictment of the economy of horror production for the big screen.
Whispers and Jumpscares
This was getting to be egregious but I think they just about got away with it. McCarthy proves in Caveat that he can do visual storytelling with no dialogue at all to focus on building tension and allowing the actions of the characters speak for themselves. He doesn't insult your intelligence but what does insult my intelligence are jump-scares. Whilst the discourse on this topic has been done to death from here and back, what I find most bothersome about it's weaponization is that it comes across like they think I'm not paying attention or I'm bored or something. You can't catch me off-guard because I am watching the movie in the picturehouse with my phone turned off.
Although I must say, I do believe that they just about got away with it by the skin of their teeth.
Marketable Plushie
I don't know why the witch or the rabbit creature needed to be in the movie.
I might get flack for saying this but they think movies like this need a personification of an antagonist that viewers can point to and say "this movie has x, y, z thing in it" and they probably think it will make the viewers feel really clever when they notice that Fiona was wearing bunny ears when she died and so is the kids show character that haunts Ohm Bauman. Even though, the image of a rabbit doesn't really conjure up anything that is a theme in the movie. Also, I don't know why Fiona who presumably starved to death and expired, didn't take her Halloween bunny suit off at any point because she definitely was just wearing normal uniform underneath because it's essentially half a full body costume.
The problem with this is greater than continuity or logic or anything like that. Stuff like this comes across very focus group-tested. It's a very clever way to masquerade as though the moviemakers are executing some kind of symbolism or something without actually having to think about it. A specific ghostly antagonist to latch on to is something The Conjuring would do and I don't believe the writer wrote all this in because it seems so unlike him. The ghosts in his previous two movies are ugly and rugged. There is that uncanny, unpleasantness in there somewhere with all the weird, little dolls and knick-knacks. It's just a shame they clash so much with the marketable plushie.
It's bad because there is actual symbolism in the moment where Mal tries and fails to get the honeymoon Suite keys from the witch's trap and Ohm saws it off in similar fashion to when Fiona was using the saw to cut him down. You can view that as Ohm doing everything he can to free the truth about Fiona in that moment to pay her back or that the keys could represent the memories of his parents' time at the honeymoon Suite and he wants his mother to be at peace so she may no longer haunt this place. They are perfectly capable.
The rabbit is very Five Night's At Freddy's. I said it. I feel like they looked at the popularity of Analogue Horror and decided on an evil, uncanny, children's mascot type of deal.
The Honeymoon Suite didn't need to be haunted by an actual witch just because the old man said it was. I was happy with it just being a space where one is confronted by demons past.
The Old Timey Hotel
I really struggle to believe that this hotel would still actually exist now and have all the old Victorian mechanical elevators and bells and lamps and employees dressed as bellboys Grand Budapest-style. Now, I realize this is a stupid complaint because you are supposed to generally take the rule of "If you are not given a date, you are to do your best with the context clues provided". They do have kiiiiiinda old-fashioned cars and the hotel is obviously old-fashioned. There are repeated usage of tape-recorders and CRT TVs but Ohm Bauman talks like he is from the 21st century and is operating something legally distinct from a MacBook Pro at the beginning of the fucking movie.
I also find it hard to swallow that this would be a popular haulm for tourists but for any culchies out there still reading this, it's probably the sort of place popular with formals, confirmations and GAA dinner-and-drinks that the lads pile onto the bus for. I refuse to believe anyone goes here for a wee holiday.
You might say at this point that, yes, it's said in the story that "we don't get much tourists around here" yet they have an off-season period which is when hotels shut when they don't have customers. It doesn't make any sense unless you are to believe a possible subtext that Mal and Mr. Cob are in cahoots and they orchestrated a closure of the hotel to divert suspicion well away from them in the advent of Fiona's disappearance. Possible? Perhaps. But I feel as though there were plenty of times to get that across to the viewer from multiple people who work there and they never did.
Again, I don't know who would go out here other than Pioneers organizing underage discos for Christians. It's things like this that lead me to believe Damian McCarthy's vision of a real nightmare with a bigger budget is being tampered with by visions of the status quo.
Or maybe he doesn't actually care and wanted it this way. What do I know?
The Conclukum
Am I in the minority for complaining about all of these things? Perhaps.
Despite a list of very bitchy gripes, I enjoyed this movie a lot. It offered more than what Caveat did whilst staying on the same lines whilst it was way more dialed in then the flat Oddity. McCarthy got his teeth way more into Ohm Bauman and fleshed him out in a way I've never really seen done in a horror movie. The writers often don't care to make main characters interesting because they are just there to be scared. I'd put him way up there in the tier of the eponymous anti-hero Pearl who finds himself redeemable and a fighter for his life by the end, despite who he was at the beginning.
He's a cut above the likes of the Doctor from Oddity and the Uncle or the lead from Caveat. The approach to making him sceptical and hauntable, yet redeemable and delible is what was missing from his other movies and from a lot of horror movies in general.
I just wish we could've maybe spent a little more time in the space of the Honeymoon Suite and the pace got a little disjointed because direction and production wasn't sure when to show certain characters and moving parts that were outside the realm of the haunted bedroom.
It was thrilling and provoking in the face of screen-chewing hollywood horror tropes.
7.1/10
