Thai tearjerker Gohan is not just for animal lovers, Hokum is a layered Gothic chiller

Gohan (PG13)

141 minutes, opens on May 21
★★★☆☆

The story: A white puppy with a pink nose ages over a decade, passing through changing circumstances and guardians both good and bad.

Thai production studio GDH 559 turns humble heart-tugging subjects into outsize hits, whether an unwanted granny in How To Make Millions Before Grandma Dies (2024) or, sadder still, a homeless dog.

Gohan is Thailand’s biggest local film of 2026, its 30 million baht (S$1.18 million) box office nearly double that of the Hollywood blockbuster The Super Mario Galaxy Movie.

The titular canine protagonist is that irresistible, this furball found outside a 7-Eleven store and adopted by an elderly Japanese expatriate engineer (Yasushi Kitachima). Gohan gives the retiree purpose.

As an adult, Gohan is taken to an abusive animal shelter, with just an undocumented worker from Myanmar (Poe Mamhe Thar) showing him kindness. He shares her yearning for a place to call home.

His final years of illness and decline are tended to by a young couple (Jinjett Wattanasin and Tontawan Tantivejakul) at a relationship crossroads. He sees them fight, and teaches them the meaning of commitment.

These three chapters along Gohan’s life journey – each featuring a new set of characters and a different dog actor – are directed respectively by Chayanop Boonprakob, Nattawut Poonpiriya and Atta Hemwadee from a collaborative screenplay.

The emotional throughline is consistent, whatever the tonal shifts from wry melancholy to grim despair to gentle optimism.

The movie is a tearjerker. But the tears come by honestly in the touching bond between Gohan and his human companions, in how he changes them, as much as they do him.

Hot take: Recommended for not only animal lovers, but also anyone who has experienced loss and separation.

Hokum (NC16)

108 minutes, opens on May 21
★★★★☆

The story: American celebrity novelist Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) travels to Ireland to scatter his parents’ ashes. A cursed country inn is his unfortunate choice of lodging.

Ohm should have checked Tripadvisor reviews or, at least, watched the 1980 Stephen King film adaptation The Shining for forewarning of what happens to creatively blocked authors when isolated in a spooky establishment, because the decrepit hotel in Irish film-maker Damian McCarthy’s Hokum is nothing if not creepy.

Top marks especially for the production design of the honeymoon suite with its cherub statues, mildewed walls and creaking doors.

This chamber was a favourite of Ohm’s parents.

It is where he becomes trapped while searching for a missing employee, and he is not alone. The main occupant is an ancient witch, who shackles victims to the monsters of hell. There are also the demons of his tragic family history that have made him a caustic, bitter misanthrope, so rude to the bellhop (Will O’Connell) and barmaid (Florence Ordesh).

Are the freakish happenings a manifestation of Ohm working through the grief and guilt in his personal life? The effects of a local tramp’s (David Wilmot) psychotropic mushrooms?

A murder mystery? Supernatural folklore?

The frightening yet blackly comic haunted house thriller is all of the above recombined. Writer-director McCarthy affirms himself as a promising new name in horror following his earlier successes – Caveat (2020) and Oddity (2024).

Severance (2022 to 2025) star Scott, meanwhile, gets his most memorable movie role to date, one unexpectedly sympathetic, as the anti-hero journeys to purgatory and returns a better person for having learnt self-forgiveness.

Hot take: Don’t believe the ironic title. The layered Gothic chiller is a very human story.