One Thing I Like About Hokum

A side effect of watching Damian Mc Carthy’s first three feature films back to back — Caveat, Oddity, and now Hokum — is that it makes it all but impossible to avoid seeing recurring ideas and patterns. That’s not entirely a good thing. Not every artist’s work is intended to be taken as a companion set, and it’s reductive to keep expecting them to iterate on the same thing over and over again. But in this case, it’s turned me into a big fan of Mc Carthy. He’s already one of my favorite filmmakers working in horror, and I’m already looking forward to seeing whatever he comes up with next. Hokum is my least favorite of the three, but it’s still solid and a lot of fun. It’s got a visibly bigger budget, for one thing. It also attracted Adam Scott to be the lead; apparently, he was already a fan of Oddity. I like seeing a filmmaker having more power to make what he wants, but it also feels as if some of the charm of the earlier movies has been sucked out of this one. It feels overall…