Extended Stay
*Author’s note: to read the pdf version of this review, click here
I watch a lot of horror films over the course of a year–it’s definitely my preferred genre. I am pretty critical, but I feel like I am fair. The surest way for a horror movie to hit me in my feels is to give me a solid but unpredictable story, a creepy atmosphere, and a few well-crafted, developed scares. Over the past two years, no horror movie has done that for me quite to the level of Damian McCarthy’s Oddity. I went into Hokum doing my best to temper my expectations–as I absolutely hated the last super hyped witch movie–but there was still a level of expectation. I felt like if McCarthy could do a percentage of the world building he did in Oddity, provide a little bit of a quicker pacing (I love the pacing of Oddity myself, but a lot of my liking the pacing is because I like the payoff), but still make the entire effort feel as atmospheric, then I would probably be satiated. I’m happy to report that Hokum hit the mark, but not exactly how I figured it would.
Initial rumblings were that McCarthy was going to follow up Oddity by doing a sort of folksy witch movie. When I think of folksy witch movies, I instantly think more along the lines of Robert Eggers’ The Witch (or The VVitch if you’re a cool kid). Hokum is not that movie at all. Think more along the lines of The Shining, or even more apropos 1408. The fact that Hokum is more of a haunted house/haunted hotel movie than it is a folkloreish witch movie is fine for me though, because the hotel is given enough of a rural, tucked away in the woods type feel so that it creates an adequate spooky setting.
I felt that McCarthy used the hotel setting super effectively throughout the film. First, you get the whole aspect of “the honeymoon suite is haunted, stay out of there”–which for us horror fans means we have to go into the haunted honeymoon suite. But in the film’s second half, the suite itself takes on a life of its own, and becomes essential to the scares. Cinematographer Colm Hogan does a fantastic job framing his shots so that the room almost becomes this living entity where parts of it feel more sinister than others.
The setting is scary enough, but McCarthy combines the setting with a plethora of unsettling visuals to really kick things up a notch. Much like he did with the wooden golem in Oddity, McCarthy shows that he has a firm grasp upon highlighting spooky objects here again, this time with creepy statues, creepy hand-carved figurines, and Jack the Donkey, Hokum’s version of the “Wooden Man”. Jack the Donkey is unsettling as hell in the movie, despite being featured heavily in the early promotional materials.
So let’s talk about the scares. The chatter online about Hokum’s jump scares is pretty mixed, but I thought they were fine. To me, jump scares are jump scares–yeah they are necessary to a horror movie especially in terms of improving the pacing, but at the end of the day they are what they are, and if they are all that you’ve got, then you’ve got a problem. There is a jump scare in Oddity that really got me, and, truth be told, I don’t feel like there is one of those to be had here in Hokum. That being said though, I am more of a slow burn, craft your scares, atmospheric scares kind of guy myself, and there were more of those this time around, so it kind of evened itself out.
Lastly, let’s talk about Adam Scott, because man, is he always good in horror movies! Adam Scott is so versatile as an actor: when he is playing a douchey character, you believe it, and when he is playing a sympathetic character, you believe it! You get both sides of Scott in Hokum, in a performance that is very much reminiscent of John Cusack in 1408. Scott as Ohm Bauman completely drives the movie, but kudos go out to David Wilmot here, whose character Jerry provides not only much of the film’s sparse comic relief, but also makes a wonderful, mushroom laced milk drinking sidekick!
Hokum is a layered haunted house movie with a little bit of whodunit thrown in for good measure. McCarthy once again displays his knack for providing creepy visuals, but this time wraps them in a movie that is at least equally as much as, if not more so, atmospheric than his previous offerings. I don’t know if it will go down as the scariest movie of the year–probably not–but it is a good offering that I look forward to revisiting!