Owing perhaps more debt to Stephen King’s The Shining than Kubrick’s, Hokum fixates on a deeply troubled novelist who imbibes too much Scotch and bourbon. So rude is Scott’s Bauman when he is in his cups that it is a wonder the hotel staff can put up with him for a day—luckily Florence Odesh’s Fiona shows enough kindness to him that she saves him from a particularly bad night before All Hallow’s Eve (or Samhain as the Celts would’ve called it in pagan times).
So when Fiona goes missing from the hotel—and after confiding in Bauman that she always was curious to poke around the allegedly witched honeymoon suite—sympathy gets the better of wisdom as the yank likewise finds himself going into the private chamber. Even when lit with what might be hundred-year-old electric light, the gloom of the place is nothing short of oppressive. It’s a space filled with bad dreams and worse waking hours.
The pleasures in Hokum emanate from its pulp. There are moments of superbly atmospheric dread wherein a soaked and abandoned Scott hides behind a Victorian bed curtain while the countenance of a creature hovers outside. Similar to Oddity’s use of the creepiest mannequin to ever crawl out of Hell’s department store, it is the belabored shots of eerily smiling cherubic statues on the the bridal suite’s clock, or of Edwardian figurines the hotel owner uses to frighten small children in the lobby, wherein Hokum earns its bite.
Less successful are the ubiquitous jump scares, which while sometimes effective, are often telegraphed and used liberally to a fault. The subtextual thesis of the film also about how even an artist’s pain can be destructive to the art feels at times a wee contrived; a fig-leaf to the modern expectations for “serious” horror cinema.
To be sure, Hokum is seriously good, but mostly when it embraces its fairy tale qualities about dark forgotten corners of the woods where spirits seek to still carry off the un-careful child of God to heathen ends. The film seeks to find a light outside of the misanthropic bleakness which can bedevil even rolling hills of beatific green. But, really, we are all here to enjoy the dark, which in McCarthy and cinematographer Colm Hogan’s compositions, is invitingly nihilistic.
Hokum premiered at SXSW on March 14. NEON releases Hokum in wide release on May 1.
