Hokum

Hokum

A pretty decent horror movie... if it had come out in 1990.

I went into Hokum with high expectations because of the trailer, its IMDb rating, and because I absolutely love Adam Scott from Severance.

Let's talk about the story. (No major spoilers.)

Om Bowman (Adam Scott) is a successful horror novelist. The movie opens with a story Om is trying to write about a man and a young boy wandering through a desert in search of treasure. The treasure map is sealed inside a bottle, but the man can't break it open because, apparently, there are no rocks in the desert. So he decides to smash it against the kid's head instead. Keep that scene in mind because it genuinely has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the story.

Om abandons the book because he can't figure out how to end it and decides to travel to Ireland to scatter his parents' ashes. Why now? Because... why not.

He arrives at a hotel located in a breathtaking setting. The cinematography and visual photography are easily the movie's strongest points. There we learn that Om is sourer than a basketball coach after a painful defeat. He's misanthropic, rude, and constantly grumpy. Yet the moment he meets a cute woman working at the hotel, he suddenly softens up.

He scatters his parents' ashes beneath a tree, flirts with the woman at the bar, goes back to his room, and hangs himself.

Why? Because... why not.

The woman somehow gets a premonition, barges into his room, and saves him at the very last second.

Why does she have a premonition? Because... why not.

Honestly, the only thing more boring than the movie is writing about it.

The film feels like it was released forty years too late because it brings absolutely nothing new to the table. Cheap jump scares, a supernatural folk-horror plot involving a ghostly witch who occasionally appears around the hotel, and a screenplay that desperately tries to connect that mythology to a disappearance, maybe a murder, that occurs after Om's suicide attempt.

It's all been done a thousand times before.

The characters are given almost no meaningful backstory, making it difficult to care about any of them, and the ending is about as exciting as staying in the bed all day.