Hokum (2026) [Film review]

Hokum was a movie that got recommended to me by AndersonVision readers. Mainly, because the younger readers keep thinking I don’t give modern spooky films a fair shake. Well, let’s get started.

The honeymoon suite at the Bilberry Woods Hotel has been sealed for years. The hotel manager Mal mentions the witch almost as a joke, the way Irish people mention certain things in the dark, half-daring you to take it seriously. Ohm Bauman takes it seriously. He is a horror writer, which is either the best possible preparation for a haunted hotel or the worst, and Damian McCarthy spends most of Hokum making the case that it is both simultaneously.

This is McCarthy’s third feature, and the conversation around it has the specific shape of a filmmaker whose arrival can no longer be treated as a surprise. Caveat (2020) announced him as someone worth watching. Oddity (2024) made him one of the best working directors in horror. Hokum is the film that confirms whether that trajectory was real. It is.

Damian McCarthy and the Art of the Contained Space

Every McCarthy film takes place in a small number of locations and treats those locations as psychological environments rather than settings. Caveat had its island farmhouse and its chained corridor. Oddity had its rural Irish home and the dread that accumulated in its corners. Hokum has the Bilberry Woods Hotel, specifically the honeymoon suite that nobody enters, and the ancient basement underneath the hotel that connects to everything the film eventually has to say.

What McCarthy understands about confined horror spaces that many directors working in the genre do not is that the space itself has to feel like it has a history before the story begins. The Bilberry Woods Hotel, shot on location in West Cork during the early months of 2025 by cinematographer Colm Hogan, looks like it has been accumulating its particular atmosphere for a very long time. Hogan’s work here is the visual backbone of the film. He knows how to use framing, negative space, and shadows in a manner that’s never showy, echoing the film’s inspirations without ever cribbing from them directly.

The camera often stays locked in Ohm’s point of view, forcing us to wonder what exactly is in the dark in front of him as much as he is. There are sequences in Hokum that are among the scariest things you will see in a theater this year, and most of them are not aggressive in their presentation. Getting under your skin is just as effective as shocking you out of your seat. McCarthy knows this.

The film takes place on Halloween, which is either an obvious choice or a perfect one depending on how generously you want to read it. I read it as perfect. Halloween in rural Ireland carries a different cultural charge than it does in America, closer to its roots in Samhain and the specific Irish understanding of the boundary between the living and the dead as something that thins rather than disappears at certain times of year. McCarthy is not working in generic Halloween atmosphere. He is working in specific West Cork folklore, the kind that gets told around actual Irish firesides, and the film’s supernatural logic is native to that tradition rather than borrowed from American horror conventions.

Adam Scott Has Never Done This Before

Adam Scott has built his career on a specific kind of deadpan likability. Ben Wyatt on Parks and Recreation, the dad in A.P. Bio, the duality he performs in Severance: these are characters whose fundamental decency, or at least their recognizable human anxiety, allows the audience to root for them reflexively. Ohm Bauman is not that character.

Ohm is a bitter, alcoholic horror writer struggling to finish the epilogue of his Conquistador trilogy, a man who burns a hotel bellboy’s manuscript rather than read it, who treats almost everyone around him with the combination of contempt and exhaustion that comes from someone who has been carrying unexamined grief for decades and calling it a personality.

The childhood accident that killed his mother, the guilt that has organized his emotional life ever since, the way his entire literary career has been built on a kind of controlled darkness that prevents him from having to acknowledge the uncontrolled darkness underneath: Scott plays all of this without making Ohm sympathetic in any traditional sense, and without winking at the audience to signal that the performance knows how unlikable it is.

Often cast as a nice guy, it’s genuinely fun to see Scott as an unlikable asshole, a role he plays with withering deadpan directness. The key observation made by nearly every positive review of Hokum is that Scott is an actor who sometimes seems better in silence than with dialogue, able to sell Ohm’s rising fear, deep regret, and even his annoying personality without worrying about being likable. Scott and McCarthy’s refusal to turn Ohm into a traditionally likable horror hero is the film’s central character gamble, and it pays off because Ohm’s lack of conventional sympathy makes his eventual confrontation with what the hotel contains genuinely consequential in ways that a more palatable protagonist could not have produced.

The Bilberry Woods Hotel and Its Residents

The supporting cast at the Bilberry Woods Hotel is assembled with the specificity of a playwright who understands that minor characters in a confined horror film carry outsized tonal weight. Peter Coonan’s Mal, the hotel manager, has the precise quality of a man who has been living alongside something he no longer fully processes, casualness about the witch that has curdled into something between professional accommodation and genuine local fatalism.

David Wilmot’s Jerry is the film’s most mysterious human presence and the character whose function in the narrative reveals itself gradually. Florence Ordesh as Fiona, the bartender whose account of the honeymoon suite’s history draws Ohm into the investigation, brings a warmth to the character that makes the film’s dark turn involving her feel genuinely destabilizing.

Will O’Connell’s Alby, the bellboy whose manuscript Ohm burns, is the moral center of the film’s first act, which is another way of saying he is the character whose treatment tells us exactly what kind of person Ohm is and what kind of justice the hotel will eventually deliver. McCarthy’s films are, as IndieWire notes, consistently supernatural morality tales, themes of guilt and punishment that Irish Catholicism has been working through for centuries, and Hokum is the most formally sophisticated version of that framework he has yet constructed.

Austin Amelio appears as the Conquistador in the framing device, a bookending sequence that dramatizes Ohm’s novel about a man and a boy lost in the desert. The minority critical view, most clearly articulated by In Review Online, finds this framing device the film’s weakest element, vaguely gesturing toward themes of guilt without deepening them, structurally contingent on the UAE co-production funding rather than organically necessary to the story. This is a fair criticism and not an unimportant one. The Conquistador sequences are the moments where Hokum most visibly shows the seams of its financing, and the film would be more coherent without them. They are also not long enough to seriously damage what surrounds them.

What McCarthy Does With a Jump Scare

Jump scares get a bad rap. They can be cheap, a crutch for directors who lack the ability to create tension through more ambitious structural means. But when paired with solid filmmaking, a good jump scare can take an otherwise pretty good movie and turn it into something genuinely exhilarating, which is exactly what McCarthy does with the centerpiece sequence of Hokum.

McCarthy’s previous film Oddity featured what many critics identified as the scariest scene of 2024, involving a flashlight, a tent, and a booming knock on the door of an isolated farmhouse. The centerpiece of Hokum does not stray too far from that template. It also takes place in an enclosed space, in the dark, with something inexplicable and terrifying jumping out of the shadows.

But the editing by Brian Philip Davis, the sound design, the production design, and Hogan’s cinematography in this sequence are so precisely coordinated that it still manages to shock and delight even from an audience that has been waiting for it. McCarthy earns his jump scares by building the architecture around them with enough patience that when they arrive, they land with the force of something you could not have prevented even knowing it was coming.

The dumbwaiter sequence, in which Ohm uses the hotel’s service infrastructure to escape a section of the basement where he has become trapped, is the film’s most inventive sustained set piece, and the sequence in which he attempts to signal distress through the bell at the front desk is the kind of practical horror filmmaking that the genre’s more theoretically ambitious wing sometimes forgets it needs. Hokum is a good old-fashioned ghost story, the kind you would tell around a campfire, built by a filmmaker who understands that classical genre craftsmanship and genuine dread are not in competition with each other.

The minor-key criticisms of Hokum are real. The film loses some focus after the midpoint, adding a little too much backstory and a few too many scenes to the denouement. The rabbit man imagery that recurs through the film’s second act works in some of its appearances and becomes repetitive in others. The witch apparition flashes on screen with a regularity that the more skeptical critics find telegraphed. These are genuine weaknesses rather than invented ones, and they prevent Hokum from achieving the tonal perfection that the best sequences suggest it was capable of.

Who Should See Hokum

If you have seen Caveat and Oddity: you are going to this film regardless of what any review says, and Hokum will not disappoint you. It is McCarthy‘s most ambitious film, his most technically accomplished, and the one that most fully delivers on the promise of the previous two. The improvement is not quite the quantum leap from Caveat to Oddity, but it is meaningful, and the Adam Scott casting represents a genuinely new register for a director whose previous films worked with less recognizable performers.

If you have not seen McCarthy’s previous films and are deciding whether to start with this one: you can. Hokum is self-contained and does not require knowledge of Caveat or Oddity to work. But the context helps, and both films are worth seeing before or after. Oddity in particular is the more immediately accessible entry point into McCarthy’s sensibility, and watching it before Hokum will prime you for what the director does with enclosed spaces and Irish folklore in ways that make the later film’s craft more legible.

If you are a horror skeptic who wants to know whether Hokum is the kind of film that might convert you: it might. The film is not relying on genre convention as a shortcut. It is using genre convention as a shared language that allows it to say something about guilt, grief, and the specific Irish relationship to the supernatural that does not require fluency in horror to understand. The witch in the honeymoon suite is real, and she is also a manifestation of everything Ohm has refused to acknowledge about his own history, and McCarthy does not feel the need to choose between these readings. The ambiguity is the point. Dismiss the folk tales at your own peril.

Hokum is in theaters now via Neon.