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.
