Hokum review – Adam Scott dour and grumpy in enjoyably eerie rural horror

Adam Scott has an unexpectedly dark, unsympathetic character in this black-comic supernatural horror. He plays Ohm, a successful American writer brooding over the nihilistic ending of his latest novel. Ohm is lonely, sliding into alcoholism, and agonized by unacknowledged personal pain. He decides to scatter the ashes of his dead parents, which he has kept for years, in the one place he knows they were happy—his parents' honeymoon spot in a run-down hotel in rural Ireland. Arriving alone, Ohm is shocked by a dead goat in the car park, which was culled for climbing on vehicles to look at its reflection. He is obnoxious to the hotel staff and Fiona, who works behind the bar, though she senses his unhappiness. Ohm suspects his parents may have stayed in the now-boarded-up honeymoon suite, where a 400-year-old witch is held captive. The premise is amusing and gruesome, but the narrative stretches into a convoluted, bizarre story involving two separate hospital stays for Ohm. David Wilmot plays Jerry, a wacky hermit living in a van nearby, who drinks a shroom-based smoothie with chaotic results.