By PAYTON McCARTY-SIMAS
Starring Adam Scott, Florence Ordesh and Peter Coonan
Written and directed by Damian Mc Carthy
NEON
Within minutes of entering the bucolic manse where his parents honeymooned so many years ago, Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) stumbles across an old man scaring young children with stories of the “evil old crone” who lives locked away in the now derelict honeymoon suite. As shots of grotesque clay statues cycle jaggedly before us, he spins a quick little yarn soaked in blood, replete with child-eating and penis-stealing. Ohm is disgusted and showily unimpressed: He’s a storyteller, too. This hardbitten alcoholic novelist has come to Ireland to finish the final entry in his bestselling Conquistador Trilogy and doesn’t seem to care for classic tall tales – other than his own, of course. In the opening scene, we watch the corner of his mouth twist into a satisfied grin as he composes a gruesome fate for a child stranded in the desert at the end of his novel, clearly reveling in his godlike ability to command the emotions of his readership. His smirk is an announcement: Damian Mc Carthy’s latest, HOKUM, is a riotous genre-pulp thrill ride expressly about the stories we tell ourselves to scream; it runs like clockwork and delivers surgically composed scares and big laughs with equal aplomb.
Like a good Stephen King novel, this movie is perfectly structured to grab you by the shoulders, get in your face, and yell “BOO!” Where his previous film, Oddity, leans into stillness for maximum effect (it is about a statue after all), HOKUM cavorts like the witch at its center, often maintaining a wonderfully rollicking pace. After finishing his novel on a cosmic bummer note, Ohm, at existentially loose ends himself, heads to this spooky inn to scatter his parents’ ashes and drink. The characters he meets there are pulled straight from the pages of an Agatha Christie novel (at least if Agatha Christie ever tried mixing mushrooms with goat’s milk). He insults the most earnestly sweet member of the staff, a bellboy/fan of his named Alby (Will O’Connell), refuses the performatively jovial manager, Mal (Peter Coonan), an autograph, and tells his tale of childhood woe to Fiona (Florence Ordesh), the hotel’s good-hearted but unflappable bartender. Several spectacularly sordid spoilers later, he meets Jerry (David Wilmot), the resident weirdo of the woods, in the midst of what seems to be a permanent if seemingly mellow bender. Soon (Mc Carthy’s script is too delicious to give away, so just picture this parenthetical as a long blacked-out line in an author’s galley), Ohm et al are embroiled in what could well be a Knives Out Mystery if Mc Carthy weren’t so beautifully Irish about it. He goes up to the forbidden suite to find clues, gets locked in, and the ballyhoo really begins. The set pieces are killer and slick, practically nonstop once they start. Scott is also fantastic, playing this unremitting asshole with mommy issues as one part Jack Torrance to one part “North American Scum.” It’s 107 minutes of good fun, with Mc Carthy’s self-aware raconteur streak winking through the dark interiors of this haunted house like the hilariously shady, side-eye-wielding bronze clockwork cherub who strikes out the time with a mallet.
Having spent almost a decade dedicated to the study of the politics of witch horror cinema, most new entries into the folkloric hag canon – the ones about ugly old crones eating babies–– present a particular challenge for me as a critic: More often than not, their misogynistic tropes terminally bog down the film’s ability to entertain, their thematic resonances fall flat under their flippant use of stock characterization. Here, though, that exact tendency is central to the plot and turned into the butt of the joke, refracted back onto writers who lean on legend. For all of its supernatural scares, this isn’t really a witch movie at all so much as a meta-witch movie à la The Blair Witch Project. There is a witch, played brilliantly by Sioux Carroll in jester-nun-hag-drag, and she’s simply fabulous, classic without being boring for a second. Her evil cackle alone is contagious, and a good amount of the film’s pleasures are drawn from her. Still, there’s a mystery at this film’s core, as Ohm ponders whether to give his novel a good, bad, or ambiguous ending, and the film’s own play with reality frames this character as simply that: a confection conjured up to frighten, rather than the embodiment of a genuine evil, an amoral force of nature onto whom meaning is layered. In a movie about a man’s relationship to his mother (and women in general, though this masculinist thread is the least well-developed subplot in the film), this intervention is particularly satisfying. Whether the witch is real or not, her legend is too powerful not to print. As the twists keep coming, Mc Carthy finds plenty to chew on – a leg bone perhaps?
Before it just meant “nonsense,” “hokum” was originally a word used to describe overwrought narrative clichés, hackneyed scenarist’s gambits, and other forms of literary horseplay. Mc Carthy’s film revels in each of these definitions, with the punchy affection of a novelist and the well-honed visual panache of an accomplished filmmaker. The overall effect is that of a good, dog-eared paperback mystery, and it’s compulsively enjoyable.
Damian Mc Carthy’s HOKUM premieres only in theatres on May 1.
