Hokum, the new horror film written and directed by Damian McCarthy, leads with a hard, undeniable truth: Writers are often astoundingly unpleasant people. In this case, the misanthropic wordsmith in question is Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott), who pecks away at his popular conquistador novels in a large, modern house illuminated by only a desk lamp bulky and bright enough to sub in for the spotlight that hangs off the side of a patrol car. Haunted by a dark incident in his past, Ohm seeks closure with a trip to the remote, Irish hotel where his parents honeymooned decades earlier. The folk tales and ghost stories accumulate during his visit, and soon Ohm’s personal tale takes its own deeply dark turns.

The storytelling gears grind loudly in McCarthy’s film. Very little that’s on screen feels authentic. Ohm’s seething anger and contempt for others, the only vaguely interesting thing about him, basically disappears after the first act. The character gets down to the narrative task of solving a mystery at the hotel, and he dissolves into blandness. The revelation of his childhood trauma is gradual in a way that’s probably meant to add gravity. Instead, it accentuates the hackneyed predictability of that backstory, making it come across as so disconnected from the character that it might as well be arbitrarily assigned to him.

McCarthy courts comparisons to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, the granddaddy of all spooky tales set in a locale with reception desks and room keys. Setting that revered horror epic as the benchmark would doom a lot of films, but Hokum is so vaporously inconsequential that it looks shabby no matter which predecessor is evoked. There’s nothing scary, creepy, or even mildly unsettling to be found here. McCarthy does a reasonably good job avoiding the usual pitfall of letting the supernatural overwhelm the basic human conflicts in the final act, but that’s not enough to make what’s happening on screen actually compelling.