Plot and Ending Spoilers Ahead.
Hokum is a horror film written and directed by Damian McCarthy. It is about Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) who is a novelist finishing the last book in a trilogy he is writing. He is grieving over his deceased mother and travels to Ireland to the Bilberry Woods Hotel to scatter his parents' ashes, as they had honeymooned together there.
Ohm is kind of rude to everyone he encounters there right off the bat. He is somewhat of a snob to most of the staff, and for really no reason. He is somewhat of an alcoholic as well, and does kind of befriend a bartender named Fiona he meets after he attempts suicide and she walks in to save him before he dies. Fiona goes missing soon after, and he spends his time trying to solve the mystery of her disappearance.
We really enjoyed parts of this film, but it really wastes what could have been a really cool concept for a traditional horror. Instead, this film wastes what could have been a good witch story by trying to focus on a story of grief that just doesn't grab you. A lot of horror films these days try to be "elevated horror" by focusing on a character's personal trauma and grief, and some pull it off very well. Bring Her Back is a good example of this. The grief story here just isn't set up well enough for the audience to really care about it.
Ohm, while trying to figure out what happened to Fiona, learns about the Honeymoon Suite which is locked and said to be haunted by a demonic witch. Of course he wants to go in there, and things really pick up from there. He ends up going down a dumbwaiter into a catacomb under the hotel and not only finds the corpse of Fiona, but comes in contact with the witch, and the ghost of his dead mother.
Then Ohm finds out that one of the bellhops he was an asshole to earlier in the film had spiked his whiskey with mushrooms, and he was hallucinating, but wasn't? The mushrooms helped him process his guilt for shooting his mother earlier on in life. So, I guess the takeaway is that he never needed to even go to Ireland in the first place to process this, he could have just taken some mushrooms just about anywhere.
Overall, this film was just all over the place. The plot about the Honeymoon Suite being haunted by the witch was really good, and they could have focused more on that. Instead, they tried to drive this film with the grief plot, which they made pointless because of the mushrooms, and it wasn't a strong enough story for people to really care about anyways. While it was ok, we probably wouldn't watch this one again.
