Hokum review – Adam Scott dour and grumpy in enjoyably eerie rural horror

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A writer’s retreat to the remote Irish hotel in which his parents spent their honeymoon brings him face-to-face with all manner of creepy goings-on in a gruesome and eccentric black-comic shocker Adam Scott has an unexpectedly dark, unsympathetic character to play in this black-comic supernatural horror which thumps you with some pretty efficient jump scares. He plays Ohm, a successful American writer brooding over the brutally nihilistic ending to his latest novel; he is also lonely, sliding into alcoholism and clearly agonised by some unacknowledged pain in his personal life. Ohm decides the time is right to take the ashes of his dead parents – which he has kept for years – and scatter them in the one place he knows they were happy, and where he perhaps hopes to siphon off some postdated happiness for himself. This is a run-down hotel in remote, rural Ireland where his mum and dad spent their honeymoon. Arriving in this picturesque but faintly disturbing place, where he is the only...
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Vaychiletik review – beautifully-shot Mexican folk music study in the high arthouse style

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A tender film about the music of Mayan descendants is hampered by the alofty adherence to a documentary aesthetic where nothing is explained

This film about a flute player and farmer named José Pérez López from Zinacantán in Chiapas, Mexico, teems with beautifully shot images of folks playing music, embroidering, participating in days-long community rituals, and tending their crops of flowers in polytunnels – pretty normal everyday stuff. It feels a little more elevated because it affords a glimpse into the life of descendants of the Mayans who practice ancestor worship and polytheistic beliefs but also have shrines with Catholic saints. The film’s website has a handy chunk of text about Bats’i son ta Sots’leb, the traditional music of Zinacantán, described in fascinating musicological detail.

It’s a shame that kind of explanatory background can’t be found anywhere in the movie. In fact, the subtitles and dialogue never even give the names of the people we are observing for most of the running time. You can only work out that the old guy is named José, and the woman who laughingly scolds him for drinking so much is Elvia Pérez Suárez, presumably his wife, and that they also live with a hard-working younger man named Esteban Pérez Pérez (presumably José and Elvia’s son) and some even younger kids: Esteban’s children? Random kids from next door? Who knows, because this scrupulously verité-style film is determined to adhere to the high-arthouse documentary aesthetic wherein nothing is explained, nothing is contextualised, and there’s no sense of what point or purpose this all serves other than a little digital tourism to a far-flung corner of the globe.

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