‘Hokum’ Review: We’re Checked In To This Haunted Irish Hotel Horror Starring Adam Scott

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We’re big fans of Damian McCarthy’s Oddity over here at Screen Love Affair. It was easily one of the best movie theatre experiences we had back when we saw it at Fantasia in 2024. So expectations were high for McCarthy’s third feature, Hokum. With each film, McCarthy has upped the ante, and this is no different, with a bigger budget, a bigger star in Adam Scott, and bigger distribution courtesy of Neon. But does Hokum deliver? Well, it never quite reached the heights that Oddity did for me, but nevertheless I loved it. I do wonder how much of that comes down to the contagious energy of a Fantasia Festival crowd, which was missing here. Still, I had a blast watching this. I will admit that I’m the exact kind of person this movie was made for. I’ve always loved ghost stories and been enamored with the way horror can excavate both the extremes of human darkness and the depths of human emotion. In Hokum, as in Oddity, McCarthy does so through the lens of Irish folklore and the contained powder keg of a single haunted location. The movie follows Scott’s Ohm Bauman, a successful yet depressed alcoholic writer, who visits a small hotel in Ireland to finish his latest novel and put his deceased parents to rest. If the setup of a writer holing away in a remote hotel until things begin to unravel sounds familiar, well the movie deliberately riffs not just on The Shining but also another Stephen King touchstone, 1408. Yet, Hokum still feels fresh and entirely its own. Part of that comes down to its setting and its rootedness in Irish folklore. McCarthy imbues the movie with the tone and sensibility of a supernatural parable or Gothic folk tale. It’s a story about storytelling and the way that stories, like folk tales or novels, can help us process feelings like grief and guilt and heal our wounds. I loved the framing device and thought it was a really unique way to structure a horror movie. There’s a similarly dark sense of humour and cynicism lurking here as there was in Oddity, but Hokum offers a bit more hope, too. I’m a sucker for stories about traumatized, grieving oddballs finding some kind of kinship with one another, even if only temporarily. Not everything here fully works, however. Bauman is such an overt asshole at the beginning that it almost beggars belief, though it does provide a lot of the movie’s early humour. And his tragic backstory is also very dark and only glancingly drawn, so the emotional climax of the movie doesn’t totally land. But when the movie gets to the extended spooky puzzle box it’s been building toward, it delivers one of the best contained horror set-pieces in recent memory. This is where the movie truly sings. And it’s where Hokum had me like putty in its hand, along for the ride with Adam Scott’s character with no way to get off. The first half of the film is really just place-setting for that exquisite third act. It takes its time getting all the pieces in place, and some of that definitely feels disjointed and lacking in scares. But boy is that third act an all-timer, proving that McCarthy truly has the goods. He just understands how to build atmosphere and tension—and when exactly to release it. Verdict Hokum isn’t perfect, but if you like atmospheric folklore-laden supernatural ghost stories, the movie has a lot going for it. Despite some disjointed character work and plotting, the spooky core of the film—rooted in masterful performances, a killer setting, and the fundamentals of horror craft—is one for the books.

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Fantasia 2024 Recap: A Celebration of Weird, Wild, and Wonderful Cinema

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If you haven’t been checking in with us lately, we’ve been covering the 28th Fantasia Film Festival here in Montreal! The festival ran from July 18th until August 4th, 2024 and included everything from screenings to workshops to book launches. Overall, there were more than 125 features and 200 shorts shown throughout the festival.  In the end, we were able to attend screenings of 12 features and 6 shorts, but we also attended ‘Her Horror Legacy’, a panel discussion on women directing horror, and got to interview the cast and director of Witchboard (2024) on the red carpet!  In this article, we’ll recap our entire experience at Fantasia, and we’ll also include reviews for the shorts we got to see, talk about the panel Adriana attended, and get her thoughts on the remastered version of Cube that she also got to see at the festival!  July 19 Carnage for Christmas dir. Alice Maio Mackay Adriana: Carnage for Christmas was a strange but fun way to start off the festival, given that it’s the middle of summer! It was a cool introduction for me to Alice Maio Mackay, who I am still flabbergasted is only 19 years old and already has five features under her belt. Anyway, this was a fun, ultra-low-budget Christmas slasher with some interesting visuals and some solid performances. Read my full review for more thoughts on this Australian holiday slasher! Elves on the Edge (Short) dir. Abby Lloyd Adriana: This short, in which a horny, Brooklyn-based elf gets it on with a Christmas tree after getting into a fight with her bandmates, is just as weird as it sounds! Writer/director/editor/star Abby Lloyd and her collaborator and composer Chris Retsina were in the house to introduce the short and provide some insight. It was apparently shot in two days on a true, self-funded, nothing budget. Gotta respect the hustle, even if the short wasn’t necessarily my thing. It was, however, the perfect accompaniment to Carnage for Christmas. Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (The Count of Monte Cristo)  dir. Alexandre de La Patellière, Matthieu Delaporte Shea: I started things off with a bang with the French film, The Count of Monte Cristo! There was a lot to like about this one, too. It was the longest of all the movies I saw at Fantasia this year, but you don’t feel that length at all. The timelessness of the story, the great production value, and some captivating performances make this a movie worth your time. This is one of the most adapted stories of all time and even when it’s not being adapted directly, the themes and beats are used in plenty of other movies. Somehow, in spite of all that, this movie manages to feel fresh and was a great way to kick off my first Fantasia experience. Read the full review for more of my spoiler-free thoughts!  July 20 Shelby Oaks dir. Chris Stuckmann Shea: This was my most anticipated movie of the whole festival! I’ve followed the writer/director of this movie, Chris Stuckmann, on YouTube for nearly fourteen years. Chris announced that he was making his first feature and eventually went to Kickstarter to get the funds he needed to finish his movie. For helping ignite my passion and love for cinema, I was more than willing to back the movie on Kickstarter and support Chris on this journey. After finally getting to see the movie at its world premiere, I’m happy to report that I was pleased with it! It wasn’t a perfect movie, but this is a great movie to start a career off with. I was most impressed with the confident direction from Stuckmann, because this didn’t feel like a feature debut at all. His genuine passion and love of film is apparent throughout Shelby Oaks, and I can’t wait to see what he makes next! Check out my full review for more of my spoiler-free thoughts! July 21 Dark Match dir. Lowell Dean Shea: You probably know by now that I love movies, but you might not be aware that I’m also a big wrestling fan (and so is my brother Ty). This horror movie is about a small town wrestling promotion that gets a gig in a town off the beaten path that turns out to be the home to a cult.  The movie stars some personal favourites of mine, including WWE legend and current AEW wrestler Chris Jericho and GTA 5 and Better Call Saul cast member Steven Ogg. This was also a Canadian production, to boot. So to say I was stoked for this one would be an absolute understatement, and boy did this one not disappoint! Writer/director Lowell Dean brought a purity of vision and a singular focus to this movie that paid off in spades. This isn’t meant to be some piece of high art, but it completely succeeded at what it was trying to do and what it wanted to be. The Fantasia crowd was fantastic at every screening I went to, but this was one of two theatrical experiences at the festival that will stick with me forever. The crowd was eating up every moment in the movie and that rowdy enthusiasm added to the wrestling movie experience we were watching together. If you’re not a wrestling fan, though, there’s more than enough here that you’ll still love (as long as you love over-the-top characters and brutal gore)! For my full spoiler-free thoughts, check out my review.  Hell is a Teenage Girl (Short) dir. Stephen Sawchuk Shea: Before Dark Match began, we were treated to a short film called Hell is a Teenage Girl. I admit, I’ve seen very few shorts in my life but the few that I did see at Fantasia did not disappoint, including this one! This one had a very Blumhouse vibe to it, as it matched the tone of a lot of the horror movies that the studio has produced over the years. This was a fairly standard horror/comedy/slasher, but the

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SLA at Fantasia: ‘Oddity’ Review

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Well, it looks like Fantasia saved the best for last! We closed out the festival this year with Oddity, a new horror movie from writer-director Damian McCarthy (Caveat) that I’m hoping blows up as much as Longlegs did. It’s deserving of all the hype Longlegs had and then some. I haven’t felt this much palpable tension and in-your-bones dread in a movie theatre since Skinamarink. But whereas that was an experimental Rorschach blot of a movie with little plot, Oddity is a genuine, old-school scary movie. I won’t spoil too many plot details, because I think you should try to go into this one as blind (pun intended) as possible. I’ll just say that the story involves a house, a murder, a blind medium who can commune with objects, and a creepy human-sized wooden doll (that is used to exquisite effect). I’ll say it right off the bat: this is my favourite horror movie of the year so far and one of my favourite horror movies in recent memory. As a pretty seasoned horror viewer, I sometimes feel like a buzzkill when friends or people I know heap praise on new horror releases that often just don’t do it for me. But I can’t remember the last time I felt this enamored of a modern-day horror movie. I really just loved everything about it, from the excellent performances (especially from Carolyn Bracken) to the sound design to the narrative choices and structure to its unabashed oddness. It all just works. Admittedly, I am a sucker for a supernatural horror story, and I love ghost stories in particular. I think they can be some of the most effective vehicles through which to not only scare the daylights out of people but also tickle the parts of our psyches that are rooted in the most primal instincts and emotions we have. A ghost story isn’t just cheap thrill or senseless gore—it’s a story, after all. And we are storytelling animals first and foremost. The immediate touchstone for me here is Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor. No one understands the real and figurative power of a ghost story better than Flanagan. Watching Oddity, I felt a kinship between the film and Flanagan’s work in tone, atmosphere, and subject matter. But Oddity is also very much its own thing, and it feels like a breath of fresh air in today’s horror landscape. The movie is supernatural and spooky in a way that feels reminiscent of the heyday of 2000s horror, but it’s also darker and weirder and still modern-feeling. And it’s very funny! There were so many moments that had our whole theatre laughing, but the most brilliant part was that none of the film’s dark humour detracted from the tension or scares. Let’s talk about the scares, because I’m sure everyone wants to know just how scary this movie is. Obviously, this is highly subjective, but I felt genuinely on edge watching Oddity in a way that is rare for me. Part of that is that the movie makes masterful use of jump scares. While “jump scare” has become almost a dirty word among horror aficionados—connoting a cheap and easy way to scare an audience—there is nothing quite like the involuntary and visceral bodily reaction of fear that a well-executed jump scare can provide. Even being able to predict when or how they might happen here didn’t dilute their effectiveness. It all comes down to execution, really. McCarthy does a phenomenal job of building up tension, then releasing it, in ways both expected and unexpected. In particular, the camera work, editing, and sound design all work incredibly well together to play on audience expectations and craft a sense of dread that lingers well after the movie has played its hand. It’s that slow build up of anticipation that really gets to me. One of the scariest parts of Oddity, I think, is how it uses a supernatural lens to play on everyday fears. The idea of feeling unsafe in my own home, for example, is one of the most terrifying things imaginable to me. It’s why haunted house and home invasion stories are so effective. And it’s the kind of thing that plays on the imagination after you get home from a good horror movie—being afraid to turn out the lights and go to bed, thinking you’ve seen a figure looming at the end of a darkened hallway at night, not being able to sleep in your own bed. These are the kinds of feelings that Oddity evokes. And it does so with just a handful of well-executed elements. A setting, a setup, props, music, camerawork—but McCarthy knows that the mind will finish the job and build up fear and anticipation and dread all on its own. This movie fully pulled me into its world and kept me on the edge of my seat. I think it’s exactly what I’ve been missing from horror for a while. Verdict Everything here is just executed to perfection. Right from the opening sequence, I knew we were in for a brilliant ride, and Oddity did not disappoint. But don’t take my word for it. Go and see Oddity for yourself, ideally in a cinema with a crowd, if possible! If you’re into oddities, ghost stories, and old-school supernatural horror with modern sensibilities and a dark sense of humour, you may fall in love with Oddity as much as we did. Shout out, also, to the crowd at Fantasia, because nothing gets me more jazzed about cinema than hearing a room of people laugh, start, and even scream in unison. The crowd and the energy could not have been more perfect for this one, amplifying the tension and making the release all the more effective. What a phenomenal way to close out our very first (and most certainly not last) Fantasia Festival.

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