Adam Scott has an unexpectedly dark, unsympathetic character to play in this black-comic supernatural horror which thumps you with some pretty efficient jump scares. He plays Ohm, a successful American writer brooding over the brutally nihilistic ending to his latest novel; he is also lonely, sliding into alcoholism and clearly agonised by some unacknowledged pain in his personal life. Ohm decides the time is right to take the ashes of his dead parents – which he has kept for years – and scatter them in the one place he knows they were happy, and where he perhaps hopes to siphon off some postdated happiness for himself.
This is a run-down hotel in remote, rural Ireland where his mum and dad spent their honeymoon. Arriving in this picturesque but faintly disturbing place, where he is the only guest, Ohm is baffled and shocked by the sight of a dead goat in the car park; it turns out it had to be culled because it was climbing up on the guest’s vehicles to look at its reflection in the paintwork. Ohm is entirely obnoxious to the hotel staff as well as to Fiona (Florence Ordesh) who works behind the bar; she is indifferent to his celebrity, but senses how unhappy he is. Ohm wonders if his mum and dad actually stayed in the hotel’s quaint “honeymoon suite”, but this is boarded up; the reason for this, he is given to understand, is that a 400-year-old witch is held captive there.
It is an amusing and gruesome premise, which writer-director Damian McCarthy stretches out into a convoluted, bizarre extended narrative involving two separate hospital stays for Ohm. David Wilmot entertainingly plays Jerry, the wacky hermit who lives in his van in the surrounding woodland where Ohm’s parents once wandered; he likes to drink a shroom-based smoothie of his own invention, with predictably chaotic results.
• Hokum is in UK and Irish cinemas from 1 May.
