Note: There is a brief reference to suicide in this review.
Every horror film teases our fear with something moving in the dark, something just out of sight. But the truly great ones take us to where the unbearable horror resides: within.
Director Damian McCarthy is able to take us on that journey, as he did in Oddity (2024) and Caveat (2020). Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) is a tortured author who drinks too much, struggling to land the plane of his trilogy about a conquistador searching for lost treasure. Haunted by a tragic past and trapped by the pressure of fame and fortune, he lights out for a remote (and very charming!) historic inn somewhere in Ireland. Here, his parents had their honeymoon. Here, he will spread their ashes and try to get over something for the first time in his life.
But nobody gets over anything in a haunted hotel.
Poster for Hokum [Neon]
The trailers for Hokum certainly sold me a bill of folk-horror goods. But the film only feints in that direction before following Jungian psychology out of the woods. The haunted hotel is introduced by an old Irishman who tells a pair of scary movie twins straight out of central casting the tale of the Cailleach: a Gaelic mythological figure who is a hag or a witch or land-spirit, depending on the story. In this one, she’s a local witch who drags people through the underworld. Or maybe she’s the woman who locked herself in the now forever-closed honeymoon suite.
Bauman samples the local uisce beatha to the point of insensibility while telling hotel barkeep Fiona (Florence Odesh) the story of his mother’s death when he was a child. Later, he heads up to his room and decides to enact a permanent solution to his professional and personal problems. Fiona, sensing something amiss, breaks in and cuts him down.
Adam Scott as Ohm Bauman in “Hokum” [Neon]
There are nods to the folk beliefs of the area, including a literal book of folktales passed between Fiona, Bauman, and Jerry (David Wilmot), a magic mushroom enthusiast who lives in the woods nearby. The book helps arm our protagonists for spiritual battles with the idea of protective chalk circles, the idea of a chalk doorway, and a hint of what’s to come.
The discerning Pagan will notice some faint runes in the title card and scrawled on the walls of the old hotel, as well as long Ogham scripts that we don’t have enough time to decipher while the lights flicker off and on. Despite this scant sprinkling of pre-Christian religion and ancient language in the text, Hokum is a fascinating film on the subject of witchcraft. Not because the path leads back to the Irish woods— because it always, always leads back into the witch himself.
When Fiona disappears, Jerry and Bauman must break into the suite where Bauman’s parents consummated their marriage to find the lost girl. It’s a typical haunted house story in many ways: electronics cannot be trusted. Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear. And all kinds of things will go bump in the night, including Mal (Peter Coonan) the hotel manager. The witch/Cailleach (Sioux Carroll) has form enough to creak the floorboards and an agenda of her own. But that’s not really what we’re here for.
Ohm Bauman is in a haunted house, but he also is a haunted house. He carries his parents with him in canisters of ash, but also in the ways that they will never leave his mind. There are restless spirits wherever he goes, including his own. The Cailleach is the least of his problems.
Florence Odesh as Fiona in “Hokum” [Neon]
As a writer, I felt very close to the problem Bauman drags around with him from one continent to the next: the inability to end his book. He struggles and writes and rewrites, trying to find an ending that isn’t as bleak and loveless as his own life has become. We see into his mind’s eye, the starved and sunburnt travelers crossing the endless dunes toward a treasure that seems forever out of reach.
All art is self-portrait. That’s not to say that the author is always telling the truth or is ever obligated to explain what came from where. But we cannot help but give ourselves away when we make something up; in some form we tell on ourselves, every time. Bauman’s desert is Bauman’s drinking is Bauman’s search for Fiona, despite the fact that he doesn’t know her and cannot stay in the country where she’s gone missing. His character keeps tilting at windmills because the windmill is always his mother.
The classic horror movie requires that the protagonist defeat or at least stand up to the big bad. Heroically, they must strive to un-haunt the house, stake the vampire, pour a big box of salt over the eldritch horror, or simply escape. Hokum’s hero has to do something much harder than that: he has to face his own greatest failure and shame. He must address the source of all horror, and in doing so render all other fears moot, irrelevant, and rather silly in comparison.
When people describe witchcraft as “spicy psychology,” it feels both true and reductive to me. I have seen people undergo profound transformation in ritual spaces when confronting or aspecting or communicating with something (a god? a land spirit? a haunting?) beyond the ritual circle. Invariably, the thing that is touched within them is personal. It’s Thor hammering trauma, it’s Anubis weighing abuse. When engaged carefully and openly, the power of ritual is not unlike the Cailleach who drives the horror of Hokum: we wouldn’t be here without her, but she only a conduit that leads to greater knowledge of the Self. Like the gods, she is undeniably real and as impossible to prove to anyone who hasn’t seen for themselves.
Hokum is a film caught between the myths that help tell us about ourselves and the myths we make with our own two hands. It derives power from both, and locates fear and triumph in both. Its witchiness is not, as one might expect, in the simple trappings of folk horror, but in the hard-won results of the ritual ordeal from which one returns changed. It is for the folk horror lover who knows the altar of sacrifice is sometimes found on a therapist’s couch.
Hokum is currently in theaters.
The Wild Hunt is not responsible for links to external content.
To join a conversation on this post:
Visit our The Wild Hunt subreddit! Point your favorite browser to https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Wild_Hunt_News/, then click “JOIN”. Make sure to click the bell, too, to be notified of new articles posted to our subreddit.