Hokum - My Take (Spoilers)

 

This was a Scream Unseen and one I was interested in as well. I consider those a double header since I get a surprise movie and one I wanted to see for one price.

This will be a short review. This is not a good sign for how much I enjoy a movie.

We've got the moody writer. We've got the dead parents. We've got the moody writer going to Ireland to scatter their ashes. We've got his feelings towards his parents shown, quite well, by how he carefully places his mother's ashes by a tree in a picture from their honeymoon and then throwing his father's ashes off into the woods.

The moody, nihilistic writer is an absolute ass to everyone in the hotel he's staying at - the same one his parents honeymooned at. There's an attempt at foreshadowing that falls flat because the Irish accent is too thick to easily understand and the story is broken up into segments so you lose track.

There's the convenient honeymoon suite that's forever locked.

So we get a movie full of jump scares and not much else. There's no actual reason for the things that happen. The writer gets a redemption arc he doesn't deserve.

The one smart thing that happened in this movie is that the writer was desperate enough to try making a chalk circle, after initially dismissing it as superstition. He gets the chalk in a believable way too.

I was hoping that this would be a horror movie set with Irish folklore, which would be a pleasant change from the generic stuff and the American focused stuff. Instead we get shown a book cover twice about Irish folklore and a generic horror movie.

The ending makes no sense. Quite literally there's nothing that gives you any idea why things happen in the finale. Maybe that story that I didn't understand at the beginning helped? I don't know.

Anyway. If you like jump scares then this is the movie for you.