Hokum

Damian McCarthy is set to become a ground-breaking, influential director in the horror genre, on a par with Jordan Peele, Ari Aster, and Zach Cregger - I have no doubt about that. Both Caveat and Oddity demonstrate his mastery of the craft, and furthermore how he possesses a rather unique understanding of set design and Lynchian camera movements in a way that only serves to heighten the build-up of suspense.

In a way, his journey as a director culminates in Hokum, the biggest, most spectacular, and most ambitious horror film McCarthy has created to date, but it's also a film that suffers somewhat from a breathless trailer and the slightly misleading quotes from the press, which are so clumsily inserted into it to create traditional "horror hype".

Hokum is about Ohm Bauman, played by Adam Scott, a melancholic but successful writer who travels to Ireland to scatter his parents' ashes near a hotel the couple visited on their honeymoon. An employee at the hotel disappears, and suddenly Ohm finds himself entangled in the hotel's dark underbelly, an underbelly involving a so-called "cailleach", a witch.

Hokum certainly does not reinvent the wheel from a structural point of view. A spooky hotel, mysterious, enigmatic guests, superstition and folklore that turn out to have more concrete roots in reality than the sceptical protagonist is willing to believe at first, but McCarthy is well aware of that too. Instead, he speaks through the cinematography, through his sets, where shadows and lighting work in tandem with carefully selected furnishings and décor to create an atmosphere of immense suspense. This film is beautiful, and it remains so throughout; and precisely because it's beautiful, well-constructed, and well-acted, it's easier to overlook its conventional structure.

Scott and everyone around him deliver brilliant performances. David Wilmot in particular, who is also the best part of the otherwise rather mediocre Bodkin series, is once again outstanding, and this helps when the film struggles a bit to get off the ground during its first act. There is, in particular, one longer scene in the film's second act - from which many of the golden moments from the terrifying trailer are taken - where McCarthy demonstrates how he can not only sustain, but also consistently build and build suspense like no other. It's a masterful 20-minute sequence that carries much of the film thereafter.

It's a little uneven, in a way that, for example, Oddity is not, and particularly in the third act, where the eeriness has become somewhat overexposed, Hokum drags on a bit, and the air goes out of the horror balloon, so to speak. But that shouldn't sound as though McCarthy doesn't deliver, because he does. Most people who love traditional, supernatural horror films will find plenty to love, particularly in the form of the director's eye for visual and auditory staging, and that's even though McCarthy has done better in the past.