Hokum

Writer-director Damian McCarthy likes one-word, ambiguous titles. Hokum follows his previous features Caveat and Oddity — all titles which are at once beguiling and mischievous, inviting the audience to call shenanigans on a tall tale. These are yarns, spun on the principle of  ‘and then another thing happened’ as weird, disquieting or bizarre events occur at regular intervals, compounding the spell or extending the trip.

McCarthy’s films always have a core of tragedy — here, Adam Scott’s bestselling writer is haunted by terrible family history and an inability to conceive of a happy ending for the final book of his long-unfinished trilogy — but stark sadness is leavened by a distinctively Irish love of telling the tale. Everyone in Hokum puts their hearts into the narration of spooky encounters, depicted as blackout-sketch flashbacks.

These memories may be distorted by locally sourced intoxicants — not just poitín (“Moonshine,” snorts the Yank) but a vile-looking brew of shrooms and goat’s milk. Eventually the spectres and witches McCarthy puts in the back of the frame for the audience to spy, well before the properly scary stuff starts, become visible to the characters, who have previously only felt their presences.

Scott, an inherently likeable performer, more than carries his weight as the initially prickly, obnoxious Bauman. An incarnation of the abrasive American visitor to Ireland, he baulks at the local pest-control system (using a crossbow on car-bothering goats) and interrupts a nasty legend a sinister raconteur is offloading on a pair of terrified, mesmerised kids. He’s a man on two missions: to scatter the ashes of his parents in the place where they honeymooned, the Bilberry Woods Hotel, and to find an end for his own story. Said hotel is a marvellously creepy institution, or maybe that’s just the way the troubled Bauman sees it. All around are props which pay off: a lump of chalk, a rusted Phillips-head screw, an irritating clock with a bell-striking cherub, a dumb waiter.

The most tantalising mystery is the honeymoon suite, accessible only by a locked-off lift. The ghost-fearing owner claims a malicious witch has been trapped inside. Friendly counter clerk Fiona (Florence Ordesh) disappears during a Halloween party and the most likely suspect is woods-dwelling mystic Jerry (David Wilmot), but Bauman, who owes a debt to Fiona and her intuitions, just can’t leave the puzzle alone. He is determined to investigate the honeymoon suite, where his own parents were (briefly) happy but which is now permeated with all manner of supernatural gloom — and some of the most gooseflesh-raising art direction in recent horror cinema.