Hokum (2026)
A film titled Hokum has made a rod for its own back, and Damian McCarthy seems to know it. The Irish writer-director — who made Caveat in 2020 and Oddity in 2024 — has spent his short career building dread out of confinement and local superstition, and his third feature applies that method to a haunted hotel with more control than either predecessor.
Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) is a celebrated horror novelist with writer’s block, a gift for bleak endings, and a personality that could strip paint at twenty paces. He travels to the Bilberry Woods Hotel in rural Ireland to scatter his parents’ ashes — the inn was their honeymoon retreat, and the staff are happy to mention it is also reportedly the domain of a witch. The film begins as a study in grief and personal failure, then shifts, via disturbing visions and a shocking disappearance, into a more overtly supernatural register. What Ohm is looking for in that hotel turns out to be less about his parents than about himself, and McCarthy is careful to keep the two threads pulling against each other.
Scott plays against his more affable screen persona to inhabit a man whose abrasiveness functions as both armour and affliction, and the performance stays specific enough to be believed. A cast of Irish actors — David Wilmot and Peter Coonan among them — provides grounded, particular support that makes the hotel feel inhabited by actual people. McCarthy takes time with these characters, and that investment becomes load-bearing once the supernatural pressure arrives.
The film uses jump scares selectively, deploying them once the scene has built sufficient reason for them, and they register. The honeymoon suite — labyrinthine, filled with unsettling miniature statues and the persistent suggestion of hidden spaces — works as a kind of domestic puzzle-box, and a sustained middle section that locks Ohm inside it generates real claustrophobic pressure. The cinematography works in shadow and stays legible. A sequence in which Ohm desperately tries to signal for help, trapped and increasingly unravelling, is the film at its most assured: McCarthy holds the tension and lets it run to its conclusion.
The scripting is where the film gives ground. McCarthy loads his narratives with more ideas than he can bring to a point, and Hokum is no exception; several threads are introduced, developed up to a certain pitch, and then left to fend for themselves. The meta-textual conceit — a horror writer who loathes happy endings, now trapped inside a story that seems determined to give him one — is the film’s best idea, and it receives less attention than it deserves. A more disciplined edit would have concentrated the film’s energies rather than spreading them.
The scripting problems are real, and they prevent the film from settling into the coherence it keeps almost reaching. McCarthy attempts more than most horror pictures bother with, and the gaps between ambition and execution are visible. Scott’s performance and the sustained pressure of the hotel sequences are enough to carry the film across its weaker passages, and Hokum ends up being a horror picture that does what it sets out to do, even if what it sets out to do keeps shifting slightly underfoot.