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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The Investigator review – harrowing documentary details search for justice after Balkan wars

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Viktor Portel’s film follows Czech investigator Vladimír Dzuro as he returns to sites of torture and death, and meets survivors as well as supporters of perpetrators

Revisiting the blood-soaked conflicts that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991, Viktor Portel’s harrowing documentary follows Vladimír Dzuro, a Czech investigator committed to bringing war criminals to justice. Drawing from Dzuro’s bestselling book The Investigator: Demons of the Balkan War, the film primarily focuses on the atrocities committed by Serbian forces; as Dzuro returns to sites of torture and death, his encounters with the survivors as well as supporters of the perpetrators are at once riveting and heartbreaking.

The Vukovar massacre, one of the most infamous incidents of the war, is recounted in eye-opening detail. In 1991, in the final days of a battle between the Croatian National Guard and the Serb-controlled Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) during the Croatian war of independence, the latter vetoed an agreement to evacuate the Vukovar hospital and turned it over to Serbian paramilitaries. In the end, nearly 300 people were executed in cold blood and dumped in mass graves. In 1996, Dzuro was a part of a mission to exhume the victims. Flickering archival footage of the campaign shows piles of bodies laid beneath the ground, a chilling visual manifestation of how history can be buried and erased. In contrast with the lo-fi quality of these newsreels, contemporary footage of Dzuro has the stylisation of a crime thriller. The look creates a gripping atmosphere, even if it also occasionally verges on overdramatisation, which the film’s already shocking true stories don’t necessarily need.

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