An American writer and alcoholic (Parks and Recreation‘s Adam Scott) travels to Ireland to lay his parents’ ashes, and winds up in a hotel ostensibly haunted by a witch, in this horror movie they should have called The Crones of Dunshire.

Attempting a folkloric twist on The Shining, Hokum is a hodgepodge of Stephen King, Irish folk horror, ghost story and mystery thriller. It balances these elements surprisingly well for the most part, with some brilliant moments along the way, but ends up stumbling around in the dark and ultimately bottling it in the final act.

Scott is suitably surly as the cynical outsider drawn into the hotel’s mysteries, though the film misses the opportunity to surround him with quirky characters, with only David Wilmot’s magic mushroom-drinking hermit bringing the folk horror goods. In fact the story is sorely lacking in local flavour and could really be set anywhere, since the whole thing is about as Irish as an inflatable Guinness hat.

But once the writer finds himself locked in the long-abandoned honeymoon suite, director Damian McCarthy delivers a masterclass in creaky old-school horror, through expertly planned shots, sound design and jump scares.

The room’s dumbwaiter leads Scott to a tape recording that conveniently explains the entire plot, which for some reason he chooses to listen to in intervals so it explains what happened wherever he is at any given moment. But he also sees a terrifying bulging-eyed rabbit-man hosting a demented kids show on TV, becoming the scariest children’s TV presenter since Esther McVey.

Sadly this is all at the service of a hokey (perhaps deliberately given the title) story whose rules are unclear, its timeline nonsensical, and which leans on dead women for our leading man to learn nothing of any great consequence about himself.

With its good bits, bad bits and evil rabbits, Hokum wants you to have fun and largely succeeds, even if the ending puts the dumb in dumbwaiter.