NEONWith any story, you expect a protagonist to bear some inkling of likability — or, barring that, relatability. That’s especially necessary for horror stories: It’s probably better if the audience is rooting for your lead character, not silently hoping they’ll get some comeuppance. Of course, plenty of scary tales have subverted those expectations by focusing on grade A pricks, but few toy with our biases as deftly as Hokum. The latest from director Damian McCarthy stars Adam Scott as Ohm, a pretentious author whose tragic past does little to excuse his awful behavior — at least, it feels that way when we first meet him. When he travels to a quaint hotel in Ireland to scatter his parents’ ashes, he quickly establishes himself as a menace, even burning a fan who wants to follow in his footsteps as a writer. Scott was “certainly” worried about going too far in the scenes that introduce Ohm to the audience. “I was like, ‘Oh God, I hope they can stay with this guy,’” the actor tells Inverse. “Those first few scenes are pretty harsh.”“It’s all about working his way back; winning back the audience.”“That feels like the moment [where] if we’d gone past that, maybe then we would have started losing people,” McCarthy adds. The director is well aware that any audience member might quietly be praying for Ohm to get humbled in the worst way possible after this scene. “From that point, then it’s all about working his way back; winning back the audience.”And boy, does Ohm fight to win us back. Though Scott’s character is knowingly tempting fate when he makes a toast “to bleak endings” at his hotel bar, McCarthy hesitated to grant him his wish. Hokum is a lot kinder than it had any right to be — give or take a few gruesome scares, and a trip to the gates of hell.Warning! Spoilers ahead for Hokum.Hokum ending explainedEerie Irish folklore provides the foundation for Hokum’s descent. | NEONOhm’s trip to Ireland has two purposes: He’s there to say goodbye to his parents, who passed years prior, but he’s also there to finish the final book in his “Conquistador Trilogy.” In the opening moments of Hokum, we witness his affinity for bleak endings firsthand. His eponymous conquistador (Austin Amelio) is searching for treasure in the midst of a vast desert, but his map gets stuck in a bottle just as he comes close to the end of his quest. His only hope is smashing said bottle on something solid... like the skull of the young boy who serves as his guide.The Ohm we meet at the beginning of Hokum is pretty proud of this ending, smugly sharing it with Fiona (Florence Ordesh), the hotel bartender. If it feels like a kind of punishment for the audience, it very well might be. But as we get to know Ohm a bit more and start to learn, little by little, how his parents passed, his motivations become all the clearer. It turns out that Ohm accidentally shot his mother with his father’s revolver. He was just a child, too young for a conviction, so he’s been living with that bitter reality for decades. That his dad drank himself into an early grave because of it didn’t improve his self-esteem much, either. “He’s someone that feels he’s owed an explanation, but he’s not going to stoop to actually look for it,” Scott says of Ohm. “He’s still so angry at his father, [but] there are all these supernatural things that happen and real things that happen — like an actual murder — [that] kind of push him to a place of being able to forgive his dad, maybe, but also forgive himself.”As Ohm is forced to forgive himself, Hokum wins the audience to his side. | NEONThough Ohm does attempt to hang himself early in the film, it’s not his demise that incites the supernatural in Hokum, but Fiona’s. The film twists itself into a kind of murder mystery (and a compelling one at that) as Ohm searches the hotel for evidence of her disappearance. The bulk of Hokum takes place in the haunted, long-shuttered honeymoon suite; Ohm is alone with only a fading lantern for protection. As the night drags on and he encounters increasingly spooky phantoms — like Fiona’s decomposing body stuffed into a dumbwaiter, or found footage of an anthropomorphic donkey-man who speaks directly to him through an old television — you start to wonder if Ohm did, in fact, perish at the beginning of the film. Is any of this really happening, or is he trapped in a Silent Hill-inspired purgatory?“Is anybody going to rewatch this? Is it going to be entertaining?”Admittedly, some of it is a manifestation of Ohm’s long-festering guilt. He hallucinates some of what he sees in the honeymoon suite, like “Jack the Jackass,” after guzzling some goat’s milk spiked with hallucinogenic mushrooms. Other things, however — like the literal witch dwelling in the basement of the hotel — are very real. This figure, known as the Cailleach in Irish folklore, chains her victims and drags them to the underworld. Ohm nearly becomes one of her victims, alongside Mal (Peter Coonan), the hotel concierge who’s also responsible for Fiona’s murder. Long story short: They were having an affair, then she got pregnant and decided to keep the baby, which would have ruined Mal’s standing in their tiny Irish town. (Finally, someone more infuriating than Ohm!)Speaking of our reluctant hero, Ohm is about ready to accept his fate and be dragged to hell with Mal and the Cailleach. In the eleventh hour, he’s visited by the specter of his mother, who encourages him to forgive himself for the accident that took her life. He manages to break his chains with the help of a file and escape the hotel once and for all, the sole survivor and witness to Mal’s crimes. He even decides to rewrite his final novel — according to McCarthy, though, his fate was nearly as bleak as the ending Ohm had planned for his Conquistador.An alternate endingHokum is part-fever dream, part-murder mystery, forcing us to question what’s real and what isn’t. | NEON“In the original scripts, he doesn’t survive,” the director tells Inverse. “He doesn’t make it out of the basement at all.” In early drafts, McCarthy would have left us with the image of Ohm, trapped in the dumbwaiter, hoping to escape before getting captured by the witch. “It just felt too bleak. I was going, ‘Is anybody going to rewatch this? Is it going to be entertaining?’”McCarthy opted for a more hopeful ending, which extends to the end of the Conquistador Trilogy as well. There’s a reason why Ohm’s protagonist has an American accent: He’s meant to be a stand-in for his father. The bottle he intends to smash against his guide’s skull serves as a metaphor for his father’s alcoholism, but in the new ending, he gives up his quest and throws it all away. Just out of frame rests the skull of a ram, which implies that hope was always right around the corner. “It’s said at the start that if they could find a skull, it would mean hope,” McCarthy explains. “And then there’s a [ram] skull lying in the desert. That’s kind of showing that what Ohm’s been through in the hotel has changed him.”The road he must take to reach this level of self-acceptance is impossibly chaotic, but all those twists and turns definitely make Hokum the kind of film you need to watch again and again — so, mission accomplished on McCarthy’s part.Hokum is now playing in theaters.