Hokum is an dream-like nightmare about guilt and encountering the other world. Damian McCarthy continues to craft well-built puzzle boxes and again the enjoyment you get from it is likely tied to how well you feel like solving it. But how doesn’t like Adam Scott playing an absolute ass of a character?
Summary
Content Warning: omd7PZ VP727 WA lZZ73MZ71 VfmPm17. gmWY72P7 lwlm2VZ sW372 mV l d7M7lZm2w ZT737 l21 ZT7d7 mV lZ Y7lVZ W27 VTWZ WA 5mWY72P7 lwlm2VZ l2m3lYV.
Adam Scott plays Ohm Bauman, an improbably-named American novelist finishing up a trilogy of novels (and struggling), who has gone to Ireland to scatter his parents’ ashes. He stays in the same hotel where his parents honeymooned. He is abrasive to the staff and generally unlikeable except to Fiona who seems willing to work with the struggling Bauman. In the periphery are strange encounters with ghost-story-telling innkeepers, drunk men in the woods, and locked rooms.
After an event [spoiler: 2eDZec effXZpfL f7 wec5 wmZLX1u] time jumps a few weeks ahead and Bauman returns to the hotel to say goodbye to Fiona only to find out she is missing. He gets caught up in a theory about what happened to her and agrees to help. Including going into the locked room where legend has it a witch has been trapped.
Review [spoiler free]
Scott’s Bauman is so deep into the Stephen King school of unlikeable writer characters that I want to believe McCarthy is making a parody of the type. He gets more tolerable as it goes on but we are talking about a man who, in the opening shot, is chuckling about emotionally destroying one of his own characters and then later in the first half hour assaults a likeable bellhop by burning him with a spoon heated over a candle.
It is of course a bit of a ruse: McCarthy is going to give us room to actually appreciate Bauman’s struggle and characterization. Besides, this is not exactly a movie where we are meant to like many of the characters. The framing and dialogue presents them in off-putting angles. If characters are the teeth in a movie’s mouth, there are cavities here. Some more festering than others. Bravo to all the actors. It takes a lot of effort to be this in between.
I am loathe to describe this movie as slow-burn1 but you could make one hell of a drinking game by reading reviews and taking shots whenever the phrase shows up. In theory, out there, somewhere, is a review where someone just types “Slow BURN” seventeen times and then finishes it out with a single, all-lower-case, “irish.”
Instead, I’d put this into the pseudo-phantasmagorical school of movie logic. There are a number of scenes that cannot be exactly approached with any sense2 and defy precise qualification. Jack the Donkey comes to mind. Glimpses of ghostly things (a few which are bound to actually be ghosts but mileage may vary). Why a honeymoon suite would have a hot-tub filled with brackish water years later or why that clock would be considered anything like romantic are the kind of questions McCarthy absolutely refused to answer. You are in it for the bad vibes, Space Pilgrim.
The story and movie as a whole is a mood. A meditation about three men and their acts of violence against women for greatly varying reasons and in greatly varying circumstances (four, if you include (semi-spoiler) Tit fLTki DtLcU bSk9ta LcTS Tit DOutMtcT, and I am not sure I do). How different circumstances lead to different tragedies. How only nightmare logic can truly encompass the size of some guilts and despairs.
One that is just delightfully creepy as hell in any number of places. There is great set design and excellent cinematography. Many of the pieces just slightly overstay their welcome, pushing us right back up to the brink of deep discomfort.
Just maybe don’t get hyped on green tea before watching it. It’s a bit…you know, slow-burn.
I’ll leave the success of the ending up to you. I think it was around 70% there but a movie that starts with solving an ending and then has a baked in debate about how to end a story…well, it was doomed no matter what.
BONUS NOTE
If you want a bonus review bit, the blu-ray I was watching glitched out about 10-minutes before the climatic bit and then cut to the middle of the climax and I was deeply unsure for several seconds if it wasn’t simply meant to be that way.
Anyhow, cleaned the disk, it was fine. Just I was worried it had gotten a bit too anti-logical for its own good.
- “Slow-burn” is nearly as useless as a descriptive term now as “torture porn” as both words have been burned into semantic saturation by reviewers working from apparently the world’s thinnest thesauri. ↩︎
- This is ignoring some weak-sauce winking towards the end about an alternate explanation for some things seen. ↩︎