This article contains light spoilers for Hokum.Early in the Irish horror movie Hokum, American author Ohm Bauman loses what little patience he had with the staff of the rustic hotel he’s visiting. When bellboy Alby (Will O’Connell) fails to comprehend his blunt and rude rejection, Ohm places a spoon over a candle, lets it heat up, and then presses it into the interlocutor’s hand. Alby recoils with shock and waits for an explanation, but Ohm only says, “You’re gonna need thicker skin than that if you’re gonna make it as a writer.”cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});For all that writer/director Damian McCarthy does right—that is, for as much as Hokum is really, really scary—the script is filled with characters who make unbelievable decisions, even by horror movie standards. Yet Adam Scott‘s performance as an unpleasant and deeply sad Ohm allows us to buy into not just the unlikely interpersonal relationships, but also the Irish folklore that drives the movie.The majority of Hokum takes place in the Bilberry Woods Hotel in rural Ireland, where Ohm’s parents spent their honeymoon. Troubled not just by his inability to end his incredibly successful trilogy of books about a conquistador, but also by the trauma of losing his mother as a small child and his late father’s cruelty, Ohm decides to visit Bilberry and scatter his parents’ ashes. Although he immediately condescends to everyone from creepy owner Cob (Brendan Conroy) to gruff groundskeeper Fergal (Michael Patric) to needy clerk Mal (Peter Coonan), Ohm manages to make nice with bartender Fiona (Florence Ordesh) and local oddball Jerry (David Wilmot).After a pair of shocking events (which we won’t spoil here), Ohm decides to investigate the hotel’s locked-off honeymoon suite. The investigation forces the skeptical Ohm to deal with all manner of frightening phenomena, including ghosts, witches, and an absolute nightmare creature called Jack the Jackass.As the outsider, Ohm plays the audience surrogate, focalizing our fears and teaching us how to react. That’s challenging, given how often the script calls for Ohm to make terrible decisions, not least of which is “Don’t go back into the hotel once the weird stuff the locals describe start actually happening.” And yet, we trust Ohm as our representative precisely because of Scott’s ability to play an everyman.Adam Scott has been on our screens since he was a teenager, initially drawing attention for playing bully Griff Hawkins in the sitcom Boy Meets World, but then falling back into a series of steady, but unremarkable, minor roles. Although most of these parts were variations of Griff, playing a little snot in an episode of NYPD Blue or a libertine in 18th-century France in Hellraiser: Bloodline. Scott finally found his ideal roles in 2009 and 2010, first as failed commercial actor Henry Pollard on Party Down and then as former child star politician Ben Wyatt in Parks & Recreation. As suggested by the similarity in their backgrounds, these characters made use of Scott’s long onscreen history, asking him to play somebody who has grown tired of spectacle.That combination of both insider knowledge and outsider reserve made Scott the perfect person to usher the audience into the absurd worlds of Party Down Catering or the municipal workers in Pawnee, Indiana. With their exasperated glances to the camera and worn-out catchphrase, “Are we having fun yet?” Scott’s characters would ensure the audience that they were right to find all the goings-on quite silly. But the fact that he was still part of it, standing there as Leslie Knope extolls the virtues of civic pride or when Ron Donald pitches Soup R’ Crackers again.Although extremely different in tone from those breakout works, Hokum asks Scott to do the same. With his bangs pulled down atop his thick glasses, an unkempt beard around his face, Ohm looks every bit like someone who doesn’t want to engage with humanity. Moreover, McCarthy throws the audience into a story that pulls not just from Irish folklore, but also from mythology unique to the hotel setting, and also a fictional kid’s show that Ohm watched as a child. Hokum gives viewers every reason to dismiss the material as too oblique or unrealistic.However, we stay in it because Ohm stays in it. He recoils in fear when a donkey man shoves his face through a curtain and he scrambles away when a dumbwaiter threatens to drag him down to the hotel’s hellish basement. But after registering his fear for the audience, he remains in the hotel, staring skeptically at the space where the monster just was. He allows us to identify everything that happened as unrealistic, while still giving us a reason to stay with the story.Even when he’s unlikable, even when he’s doing things we would never do, Adam Scott represents us on screen.Hokum is now playing in theaters worldwide.The post Hokum Cements Adam Scott as One of Our Great Everyman Actors appeared first on Den of Geek.