‘Hokum’ hearkens back to handmade haunted-house horror
2026 / Dir. Damian McCarthy
Rating: 3.5/5
Watch if you like: Oddity, 1408, The Shining, drinking magic mushroom milk while getting trapped in a hotel room haunted by an Irish witch instead of just going to see a therapist for your family trauma.
Popular author Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott, playing against his usual type) is a big asshole. He’s a total jerk to everyone he meets and clearly miserable, spending his nights drinking and trying to finish the final novel in his bleak Conquistador series. And maybe he’s being haunted by the ghost of his mother. Needing a change, he takes a trip to a creepy lodge hotel in rural Ireland, where his parents had happily honeymooned, before years of impending family tragedy, to scatter their ashes.
Things are clearly amiss at the Bilberry Woods Hotel immediately, with Ohm coming across a hotel staffer killing a goat for jumping on cars in the parking lot, and finding the honeymoon suite his parents had stayed in has been locked away for decades, allegedly due to a witch haunting. Even with his awful attitude, he still manages to be charmed by the old hippie, Jerry (David Wilmot, Hamnet, Station Eleven), and barmaid, Fiona (Florence Ordesh), who seems to be able to see Ohm’s pain beneath his gruff exterior. When Fiona goes missing, and all signs point to the haunted honeymoon suite, you can guess where Ohm’s headed.
While I haven’t been the biggest fan of Damian McCarthy’s previous films, Oddity and Caveat, his movies have excelled at bringing a handmade, tactile feel to their production design that carries over here with unnerving wooden figurines, carved faces in furniture, and the overall look of the honeymoon suite that’s trapped decades in time. If anything, he could have leaned more into the folk horror aspects here, instead crafting a tight, old-school haunted house story that hearkens back to the days before CGI-heavy jumpscare factories like The Conjuring. There were quite a few scares that made me jump, and I was genuinely uncomfortable for much of the film.
Hokum plays more like a really good theme park ride with excellent window dressing, but there’s not much more to it than that compared to other recent horror films like Obsession. There’s an interesting “witch lore” that I would have genuinely wanted to know more about, that only gets touched on in a movie that doesn’t have a setup that screams sequel by any means, leaving the movie’s world to feel underdeveloped.
Similarly, while Adam Scott gets a lot of mileage out of his acerbic performance, some of his choices and backstory, which I don’t want to spoil, could have been expanded or better interwoven with the haunted hotel room. You expect his personal tragedies to be connected to his parents’ honeymoon and the room itself, but it all feels like an excuse to get him to the hotel rather than anything meaningful. His character could have just been a guy who wanted to go for a trip, and the impact would be about the same.
There’s still plenty to love and respect about Hokum, with its clever scares, attention to creepy details, and clearly a lot of care that went into it. This is also McCarthy’s tightest and most realized horror vision to date, making great use of his largest film budget, and a promising step forward in his career. Whether you’re a fan of his previous movies, looking for a fun date night, or a horror fan, Hokum is worth the trip into its witchy lair.