Hokum

With Hokum, Damian McCarthy confirms that he is no longer just one of the most promising new voices in contemporary horror, but also one of its most precise craftsmen—a filmmaker capable of transforming a creaking hotel hallway, a dumbwaiter, a bell, a carved cherub, or a patch of darkness into instruments of pure dread. After Caveat and especially Oddity, expectations were naturally high, and this new feature film comes across both as an extension of his previous obsessions and as a more accessible haunted house nightmare, one that draws on the traditional mechanics of ghost stories without ever seeming outdated. The title itself is wonderfully mischievous: Hokum suggests nonsense, theatrical trickery, a tall tale told to scare children around a campfire, and yet the film spends nearly two hours proving that folklore, grief, and guilt can become terrifyingly realistic when one refuses to believe in them. Set largely in the isolated Bilberry Woods hotel in rural Ireland, the film understands that horror works best when a location feels less like a set and more like a character, and here, every object seems to have waited years to be part of a curse.

Actor Adam Scott plays Ohm Bauman, a successful American novelist whose fame has done nothing to soften his character. He arrives in Ireland with his parents’ ashes, hoping to scatter them near the hotel where they spent their honeymoon, but also dragging behind him the weight of an unfinished life, an unfinished novel, and an unresolved family trauma that has poisoned his imagination. His literary work, a dark Conquistador trilogy whose final pages envision cruelty in a sun-scorched desert, reflects his own inner collapse: Ohm Bauman is a man who can only imagine endings as punishments. What makes the role so fascinating is that Adam Scott refuses to make him a conventionally likable character. It’s not the charming energy of the sad sack we know from some of his comedic works, nor the wounded duality of Severance; here, he is abrasive, sarcastic, dismissive, sometimes downright cruel—especially toward the enthusiastic young bellhop Alby, played by Will O’Connell, who makes the mistake of approaching his literary idol with admiration. The performance works precisely because Adam Scott understands that fear becomes more interesting when it affects someone who, in a way, might believe they deserve it.

The Bilberry Woods Hotel is presented as a place where local legend and administrative decay have fused into a single unhealthy organism. Peter Coonan brings an elusive politeness to Mal, the front desk clerk whose surface-level courtesy never quite manages to dispel the unease surrounding him, while Brendan Conroy makes the owner, Mr. Cobb, look like a man who has told terrifying stories so many times that he no longer needs to embellish them. The hotel’s forbidden bridal suite, sealed off and accessible only by a locked elevator, is said to house a witch imprisoned for centuries—a legend that Ohm Bauman immediately dismisses as superstition. Yet Damian McCarthy is too clever to simply present this legend as a mere exposition. He lets it permeate the space: in the turnip lanterns, the witch sculptures, the old wood, the faded wallpaper, the dead traditions, and the whispered warnings. The set has the texture of a place that smells of mold, dust, and aged alcohol, and the work of production designer Til Frohlich, set decorator Ciara McKenna, cinematographer Colm Hogan, and editor Brian Philip Davis imbues the hotel with an almost artisanal malevolence. Nothing seems random, even as the narrative itself begins to unravel.

The emotional linchpin of the film is Fiona, played by Florence Ordesh, a bartender whose kindness toward Ohm Bauman briefly pierces his armor. She is not presented as a mere innocent, but as someone who perceives the misery behind his arrogance and defies the gloom of his imagination. When she disappears after the Halloween festivities, Ohm Bauman finds himself drawn back into the hotel’s secrets, not because he has suddenly become noble, but because guilt, curiosity, and a rare debt of gratitude begin to weigh on him like a curse. David Wilmot is terrific as Jerry, the wild man of the woods, an eccentric outsider living among goats, mushrooms, and local rumors, whose absurdity lends the film one of its strangest comic textures. His concoctions made from goat’s milk and mushrooms could easily have tipped the film into parody, but Damian McCarthy uses these details to reinforce the sense that reality itself has become porous. The film is often funny, but never in a way that relieves the tension for long; every laugh seems to leave behind a colder echo.

It is in its long descent into the bridal suite that Hokum becomes truly captivating, a space that feels like Damian McCarthy’s answer to the cursed rooms of classic horror cinema, from The Shining to 1408, but filtered through Irish folk horror and the director’s obsession with sinister props and strange objects. The room is a masterpiece of controlled unease: a bed in ruins, a grimy hot tub, bells, dolls, cherubs, old mechanisms, a dumbwaiter leading down into the darkness, and nooks where the eye constantly searches for the slightest movement. Colm Hogan’s cinematography deserves high praise, as the darkness is never lazy or indecipherable; it is shaped, textured, and alive, allowing the audience to fear what might lie just beyond the reach of the lantern. Joseph Bishara’s score, filled with moans, choral unease, and spectral tension, reinforces the sensation that the building is breathing around Ohm Bauman. Jump scares are frequent, but the best ones are achieved through composition and patience rather than cheap volume. Damian McCarthy knows the difference between startling an audience and trapping them in anticipation until they almost beg for the shock to come.

The film’s greatest strength is also the source of its main weakness. Hokum is brimming with ideas: a haunted hotel, a witch, family trauma, a missing woman, a writer’s writer’s block, a possible suicide, local folklore, distorted childhood memories, rabbit imagery, ghostly apparitions, human malice, and a symbolic confrontation with guilt. At times, the film risks becoming overloaded, as if Damian McCarthy had built a cabinet of horrors so rich that he couldn’t help but open every drawer. Some mysteries remain deliberately unresolved, and while this ambiguity suits the fairy-tale atmosphere, a few narrative threads seem less evocative than underdeveloped. The bizarre television visions, the rabbit-man imagery, and certain human motivations don’t always stand out with the same clarity as the central emotional arc. Yet even when the plot becomes messy, the atmosphere remains so strong, and the direction so assured, that the excess is part of the film’s strange charm. This is not a sleek, minimalist horror film; it is a haunted object overflowing with shards, dust, and secrets.

What elevates Hokum beyond a mere exercise in the haunted hotel genre is its conception of storytelling itself as both a curse and a potential salvation. Ohm Bauman writes dark endings because he cannot imagine forgiveness, and the hotel becomes the physical manifestation of that failure. The supernatural may be real, metaphorical, hallucinatory, or an unstable combination of the three, but the film does not reduce ghosts to trauma in the trendy sense of the term. On the contrary, Damian McCarthy allows the ghosts to be both ghosts and symbols, which is far more satisfying. The witch is not merely an allegory, the hotel is not just a state of mind, and Ohm Bauman’s ordeal is not merely therapy punctuated by startles. The film believes in folklore as a form of truth, in stories as warnings, and in horror as a moral architecture where the past does not simply disappear because a skeptic refuses to look at it.

Hokum may not be as perfectly focused as Oddity, and its final act sometimes buckles under the weight of its own mythology, but it is also stranger, funnier, and more emotionally ambitious. Adam Scott delivers one of his best performances, transforming an unpleasant man into a fascinating vessel of fear and regret, while Damian McCarthy proves once again that he possesses a rare gift for making familiar elements of horror dangerous all over again. It is a film of creaking doors, bitter memories, sinister folklore, and skillfully orchestrated shadows—a ghost story that challenges the viewer to dismiss it as nonsense before dragging them into the darkness and forcing them to listen. Despite all its imperfections, Hokum is an unforgettable, rich, unsettling, and often genuinely frightening experience that confirms Damian McCarthy as a major horror filmmaker with a voice all his own.

Hokum
Written and directed by Damian McCarthy
Produced by Roy Lee, Steven Schneider, Derek Dauchy, Ruth Treacy, Julianne Forde, Mairtín de Barra
Starring Adam Scott, Peter Coonan, David Wilmot, Florence Ordesh, Michael Patric, Will O'Connell, Brendan Conroy, Austin Amelio
Cinematography: Colm Hogan
Edited by Brian Philip Davis
Music by Joseph Bishara
Production companies: Image Nation Abu Dhabi, Team Thrives, Spooky Pictures, Tailored Films, Cweature Features
Distributed by: Neon (United States), The Jokers (France)
Release dates: March 14, 2026 (SXSW), April 29, 2026 (France), May 1, 2026 (United States)
Running time: 107 minutes

Viewed on May 8, 2026 at Gaumont Disney Village, Theater 8, Seat A19

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