Three features in, Irish writer-director Damian McCarthy seems to have found his niche. His first two films, Caveat and Oddity, are supernatural horror movies set in Ireland that intersect human folly and folklore to give the mystical elements a moral grounding. The filmmaker’s latest offering, Hokum, falls in line thematically with those two projects but by sticking with familiar narrative territory, McCarthy has refined how he tells his spooky story. This is his most narratively compelling and consistently unnerving effort to date, led by a familiar face and several others that may not be as familiar to American audiences. It’s also one you’ll want to see with a crowd, not only because it’s best enjoyed in a dark, distraction-free area but because there are different moments that may generate the biggest scares among the audience. Caveat and Oddity both had one jump scare that was clearly meant to be “the big one” but Hokum has a few that could qualify.

The film stars Adam Scott as Ohm Bauman, a morose author of a popular book series involving a conquistador and his journeys. While drinking and writing late one evening, he has a nagging feeling of unfinished business in addition to writing the epilogue of his latest novel. His late parents requested that their ashes be spread at the hotel in rural Ireland where they honeymooned, so Ohm makes the trek to honor their wishes. He’s surly with the staff, including the desk clerk Mal (Peter Coonan) and bellhop Alby (Will O’Connell), but his interest is piqued when bartender Fiona (Florence Ordesh) tells him the honeymoon suite has been locked off by the hotel’s owner Cob (Brendan Conroy). He claims that the room has been haunted by a witch for years and he doesn’t want to risk letting the evil out. After Fiona goes missing during his stay, Ohm suspects she may have gone missing in the haunted quarters and breaks in to confirm his theory.

Adam Scott is likely best known for his television work as sympathetic protagonists in Parks And Recreation and Severance but his character in Hokum is markedly pricklier. He brusquely refuses to sign one of his books for a fan and when Alby confesses he has aspirations to write, Ohm burns Alby’s hand with a hot spoon and mocks, “You’re gonna need thicker skin than that if you’re gonna make it as a writer.” During the initial part of his stay at the Bilberry Woods Hotel, you’re almost hoping some terrible creature of Irish myth comes out and devours this guy. But in time, we find out what drives him to drink: a tragic accident in childhood that permanently fractured his relationship with his parents. Scott does excellent work shifting Ohm’s arrogance and ego in the first act to a care and curiosity when the one person he opens up to at the hotel disappears without a trace. By the time he makes it up to the room, he’s about as petrified as we are.

Teaming up again with Oddity cinematographer Colm Hogan, Damian McCarthy does an outstanding job filling Hokum with mostly-static frames of dimly lit halls and rooms where we’re forced to reckon with what waits in the shadows. One reason McCarthy excels at delivering superlative jump scares is that he sets them up with patient shot selection where our eyes slowly adjust to differing levels of darkness. But for those wary of artsy “slow burn” horror that goes nowhere, believe that McCarthy knows how to pay off the moments of silence and stillness brilliantly. The overall pace of Hokum feels more brisk than McCarthy’s previous films but it reflects a confidence in storytelling rather than a director trying to rush through things. This is a filmmaker who’s honing his craft and refining the ways he can chill us to the bone.

True to its title, the otherworldly aspects of Hokum tend to be the most compelling and the more formulaic human-based mystery takes over a bit too much of the third act. There’s a specific sequence set around a ringing bell that’s tense for a time but ends up feeling more contrived as it plays out. But like the possessed wooden golem in Oddity, McCarthy again populates his tale with memorable ghouls to keep us up at night. Will O’Connell does double duty in a nightmare scene as Jack The Jackass, a demented children’s show host that sports Pennywise-like bulging eyes and surrealist anthropomorphization out of a David Lynch offering. If you’re someone who’s always looking for more things that go bump in the night, Hokum is happy to oblige.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Mortal Kombat II, starring Karl Urban and Adeline Rudolph, is an action sequel in which martial arts combatants from the Earthrealm battle in a high-stakes contest designed by the tyrannous emperor of the Outworld.
The Sheep Detectives, a comedy mystery starring Hugh Jackman and Nicholas Braun, follows a flock of sheep as they work together to solve a murder case after their beloved shepherd is found dead.
Billie Eilish – Hit Me Hard And Soft: The Tour is a 3D concert film directed and produced by James Cameron, featuring performances from pop superstar Billie Eilish during the Manchester, England dates of her Hit Me Hard And Soft tour last year.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

It’s said that holding onto resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. As the new psychological drama Mother Mary opens, it’s clear that fashion designer Sam Anselm (played by Michaela Coel) has more than her fair share. After years of crafting bespoke costumes for pop singer Mother Mary (played by Anne Hathaway), their creative collaboration is cut short, leaving Sam shamed and stunned. She retreats to the English countryside and picks up the pieces, continuing to consult for clients who don’t perform for thousands of screaming fans but provide steady business nonetheless. Sam and her team are surprised to see Mary turn up at Sam’s home, rain-soaked and white as a ghost, years after their partnership ended. Desperate for Sam’s help, she says she needs a show-stopping dress for her comeback tour that kicks off in three days; it’d be a difficult request under normal circumstances but given the context, it’s more in the area of “unthinkable”.

Though she’s shaken, Mary attempts to ingratiate herself with Sam by saying she hasn’t changed since they last saw each other; Sam insists that she has, shooting back, “You’ll see what the years have made of me.” She hasn’t listened to Mother Mary’s music since their relationship dissolved and she doesn’t plan on breaking the streak, making Mary perform the taxing choreography for her new song “Spooky Action” without backing music. Her jagged movements read as those of a woman possessed and as the two women move forward with their improbable joint effort, they confide in one another that they’ve each been haunted by a spectral figure adorned in elegant cloth. Their only chance of cleansing themselves from the lingering spirits is to navigate their turbulent shared past and find a way forward together.

Mother Mary is another moody, metaphor-laden affair from writer-director David Lowery, operating here in a similar vein of his other A24-distributed existential dramas A Ghost Story and The Green Knight. Quality-wise, his latest effort falls somewhere in between those two, occasionally labored in its personification of the central analogy but frequently stunning in its craft and execution. The movie has two very different locations that function as a pair of “home bases” for most of the runtime: the blindingly-lit packed arenas in which Mother Mary performs and Sam’s spare barn-turned-workshop. As the two women rehash their past, the set design brilliantly merges these vastly different locales seamlessly and in stunning fashion.

If Mother Mary isn’t quite a horror film and not exactly a music movie either, it’s best categorized as a tense two-hander between a pair of actresses operating at a mutually high level. Anne Hathaway does a great job belting out the film’s original tunes — penned by Charli XCX and Taylor Swift collaborator Jack Antonoff — but even aside from the music, this stands as one of her finest performances to date. It helps that she has the marvelously magnetic Michaela Coel, who flawlessly conveys Sam’s bitterness without making her seem cruel or petty, as a scene partner. Their work together is marked by restraint, a fierce determination by both characters to redirect their emotions and to delay words unsaid just a little bit longer. As good as the play-like production design is, Hathaway and Coel are the reason to see this movie.

The tête-à-tête angle of the film ultimately coheres better and is more psychologically compelling than the supernatural elements, which take hold around the halfway point during a séance sequence. David Lowery’s imagery, involving the ghost in fabric that haunts both Mary and Sam, can get redundant and heavy-handed down the stretch. The music score by frequent Lowery cohort Daniel Hart sets the quieter scenes well but there’s one particular montage where the composition was so bombastic that I actually had to stifle a chuckle. Seven features in, Lowery has proven himself to be a filmmaker who takes chances with his storytelling, in haunted tales like this and in his takes on fantasy adventures like Pete’s Dragon and Peter Pan & Wendy. Like Mother Mary wears a halo on her head for her sold-out performances, Lowery wears his heart on his sleeve when committing his vision to the screen.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
The Devil Wears Prada 2, starring Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway, reunites a legendary fashion magazine editor-in-chief with a pair of her former assistants, who have since risen the ranks within the industry.
Animal Farm, starring Seth Rogen and Gaten Matarazzo, adapts George Orwell’s satirical fable of anthropomorphic farm animals as they rebel against their human master and hope to create a society where all animals can be equal, free, and happy.
Deep Water, starring Aaron Eckhart and Ben Kingsley, follows a group of international passengers en route from Los Angeles to Shanghai as they’re forced to make an emergency landing in shark-infested waters.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

The campy supernatural tale Forbidden Fruits is, as I’m told the kids say, a lot. Adapted from the 2019 Lily Houghton play *big breath* Of the woman came the beginning of sin, and through her we all die, the big-screen treatment opts for a snappier title but maintains the verbose spirit of the source material. The snarky screenplay, co-written by Houghton with director Meredith Alloway, is littered with allusions to female-facing millennial mainstays like The Devil Wears Prada and Mean Girls. That the film’s narrative so obviously mirrors the latter at the outset seems to be by design, luring us in with a familiar story of yore to develop into something more dangerous and deadly. While it never reaches the subversiveness of titles like Heathers or The Virgin Suicides, it’s a pastiche ripe with themes about how hard it can be for young women to stick together.

Forbidden Fruits takes place almost entirely within the confines of fictional Texas shopping center Highland Place Mall, where the supercilious Apple (Lili Reinhart) and her fellow Free Eden employees Cherry (Victoria Pedretti) and Fig (Alexandra Shipp) rule the roost. When they arrive at the food court, other mall workers scurry to leave them at what now becomes the popular kids’ table. It doesn’t quite scare off Pumpkin (Lola Tung), a new hire at the Auntie Anne’s fill-in Sister Salt’s, who offers them pretzel bite samples and piques their interest in the process. Pumpkin subsequently applies to work at their Urban Outfitters-like store and when she passes the interview with flying colors, she not only joins their clique but also their secret coven, where they perform rituals in the basement of Free Eden after-hours.

It’s when things get witchy — and a word that rhymes with “witchy” — that feminist fable Forbidden Fruits feels free to let its freak flag fly. Once Pumpkin is in the group, she discovers how controlling Apple is over Cherry and Fig’s lives, blocking off their personal calendars for them and casually lobbing barbs like, “that’s another unattractive quality we need to work on.” She also learns of a hex that befell ex-employee Pickle (Emma Chamberlain), so catatonic as a result of the witch’s curse that she’s seen literally banging her head against windows of outlets in the mall. There’s obviously something rotten at the root of this supposed paradise atop Apple’s guise of sisterhood and the more time Pumpkin spends with the trio, the more resolved she feels to expose the extent of the performative friendship they have in place.

Diablo Cody, who penned high school-set comedies Juno and Jennifer’s Body, serves as executive producer here and it’s fair to say that if she had written a reboot 30 years removed from The Craft, it could’ve come out very similarly to Forbidden Fruits. Even though this movie is seemingly set in the present day, it certainly maintains the late-aughts veneer of Cody’s most notable efforts; depicting a shopping mall as bustling in 2026 is arguably more anachronistic than featuring smartphones in a film set 20 years ago. What feels fresh in this film is how it angles against Apple’s brand of false feminism, wherein she can assert poisonous control over her friends’ lives by labelling any male interloper as part of the patriarchy. She feels so threatened by the suggestion that these ladies talk through their feelings at therapy that she forces them to confess their sins to the spirit of “ultimate femme martyr” Marilyn Monroe in a designated dressing room.

It may be too much to ask Forbidden Fruits to be more of anything but I wish it had committed to the edginess of its very first scene — involving a hot latte and a lecherous man’s crotch — in its storytelling. Meredith Alloway also delays the peripheral horror trappings to the degree that the violent final 20 minutes and mid-credit scene almost feel like they belong in a different movie. But the film’s more crucial aspect is the satirical heightened reality that she and her quartet of young actresses establish before the conclusion. Everyone here is on the same page aesthetically and tonally, down to Lili Reinhart’s ostentatious amber wig that seems to have been snatched from Nicole Kidman’s character in Practical Magic. Just as fashion is never finished, films like Forbidden Fruits about women navigating the tricky territory of burgeoning bonds will always be en vogue.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Beginning in theaters on Wednesday is The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, an animated adventure starring Chris Pratt and Anya Taylor-Joy, continuing the saga of the Super Mario Bros as they team up with Yoshi and Princess Rosalina to take on Bowser’s son Bowser Jr.
Also coming to theaters is The Drama, a black comedy starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, in which a couple’s relationship is shaken days before their wedding when one partner discovers unsettling truths about the other.
Premiering on Hulu is Pizza Movie, a college comedy starring Gaten Matarazzo and Sean Giambrone, following a pair of psychoactively-inhibited students who face an unexpectedly epic journey when they must navigate two flights of stairs to retrieve their pizza delivery.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup