Hokum: haunting folk horror film packed with jump scares

Set in a remote Irish hotel, this horror film is “effectively a love letter to jump scares”, said Kevin Maher in The Times. At the screening I was at, there were moments when people were “almost crying”, owing to the relentlessness of the frights.

The film stars Adam Scott (“Severance”) as Ohm Bauman, a “fabulously dyspeptic” bestselling American novelist who has come to Ireland, reluctantly, to scatter his parents’ ashes. They spent their honeymoon at this rundown hotel. He has no time for the yokels or the landscape, and demands a room “as far away from the craic as possible”, but when the hotel’s barmaid goes missing, he is drawn to a sealed-off honeymoon suite said to contain a Celtic witch notorious for dragging guests down to hell. “Cue the jump scares.”

With this “sly, self mocking” film, the Irish writer-director Damian McCarthy certainly proves himself to be “a dab hand at suspense”, said Jonathan Romney in the Financial Times. The build-up is finely tuned, and the opening is surprising. He is good at space too: the hotel’s cavernous interior and its winding corridors open up well, with lots of creaks and groans.

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But when it comes to unpacking the tragedy Bauman carries on his shoulders, “Hokum” “overplays its hand”. A man haunted by the past, whose scepticism about the supernatural is challenged; a young woman in peril – the storyline is not original, said Billie Walker on Little White Lies. And nor are any of the spooky figures, which range from 1950s housewives to toothless hags. The film does deliver jump scares; the trouble is, it doesn’t deliver much else.