OVERVIEW
In Hokum, Adam Scott plays Ohm Bauman, a celebrated Stephen King-adjacent horror novelist known for bleak endings and a pretty low opinion of people. Stuck on the conclusion to his acclaimed Conquistador trilogy, he finally travels to a remote West Cork inn to scatter his late parents’ ashes, years after their urns first ended up with him. He arrives on Halloween weekend, dismissive of the staff’s warnings about the boarded-up honeymoon suite and the witch said to be sealed inside. His stay extends, and one of the staff members goes missing.
BACKGROUND
Hokum is the third feature from Irish writer-director Damian McCarthy, the latest step in a steep climb from a no-budget debut shot with a crew of five to the widely praised, if overvalued, Oddity. He now arrives at Neon, the indie distributor that has spent the last two years aggressively expanding its horror lane after the huge success of Longlegs, with mixed 2025 results: Together worked, Shelby Oaks and Keeper did not. On paper, Hokum seemed like an easy bet: a promising director coming off an SXSW Audience Award, a haunted-hotel premise rooted in Irish folklore, and Adam Scott in his first horror lead, fresh off the second season of Severance.
THE REVIEW
The budget wasn’t the only thing that grew out of Oddity; so did what worked in that film, and so did what didn’t. Like the 2024 horror film, McCarthy demonstrates once again his ability to craft creepy set pieces that stick to the memory, a few admirably constructed, then surrounds them with a disjointed plot that is unable to connect them. We’re once again left with a film that works perfectly in trailer format but struggles to sustain its atmosphere amid a scattered plot.
Hokum first plays like a character study of a guilt-ridden alcoholic writer sinking into depression. Then it becomes a haunted-hotel mood piece, full of eccentric staff members and folklore exposition. From there, it shifts into a missing-person whodunit, then almost immediately into a locked-room escape thriller. Eventually, the film reaches for a larger metaphorical meaning, but by then it feels less like a natural escalation than another mode being added to the pile. Each section has the shape of its own short story, only without the chapter screen to separate it from the last one.
The shifting itself is not the issue. Horror can survive tonal swerves, genre detours, and a fair amount of narrative disorder. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners recently showed how those changes can deepen one another when the film knows exactly what each piece is doing. The trouble with Hokum is that characters and settings exist only as long as the film needs them, sometimes dispatched literally, sometimes for simple convenience. McCarthy will introduce someone as a delivery system for folklore and mythology, then, minutes later, ask you to read them as a murder suspect. Each new phase changes the audience’s job, and after a while, you stop trying to keep up.
A late twist tries to unify the scattered pieces by inviting the audience to reframe everything through a new lens. It surprises and patches over a few gaps, but it answers a question the film never made urgent enough to ask, and it does not make the characters richer or the story more satisfying. The reveal works as a clever puzzle piece for its own sake, and little else.
If Hokum holds together at all, it is mostly because of Adam Scott. He bridges the film’s many disconnected sides and gives it a flicker of coherence that the screenplay often denies his character. As hinted at in his brief but memorable opening to The Monkey, Scott has a real face for horror, and his willingness to embrace Ohm’s unlikability makes the moments when the character is scared or vulnerable truly land.
He is helped by strong craft. The production design gives the hotel a suffocating familiarity, so claustrophobic that its strange layout only fully registers afterward. The sound design is the film’s strongest element, built from sparse, deliberate textures that create dread without relying on the usual jump-scare shortcuts. McCarthy is also once again strong in creature design: the witch and the rabbit-like figure haunting Ohm’s dreams are simple in concept but leave a real impression on screen.
McCarthy remains genuinely talented at crafting short set pieces that work as standalone moments. A black-and-white dream sequence in an elevator, the image of a frozen woman, and, later in the film, a character being dragged through a dark basement are exquisitely constructed and deserving of a better film around them. Others go on too long, like the bell-ringing sequence that exhausts itself almost as soon as it signals its destination.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Even with a strong Adam Scott performance to anchor it, Hokum ends up another McCarthy film that is far less than the sum of its parts. There are things to like here, and for some, the short glimpses of a great film present in individual scares are enough to overcome how frustratingly incoherent it all is. Others might appreciate the constant hints and enjoy watching YouTube videos that unpack every detail. Yet all of it is in service of a screenplay that doesn’t deserve it.
- Where to watch
Buy or rent
Prime Video
Play trailer
- Original title
- Hokum
- Director
- Damian McCarthy
- Genre
- Horror
- Cast
- Adam Scott, Peter Coonan, David Wilmot, Florence Ordesh, Michael Patric, Will O'Connell, Brendan Conroy, Ezra Carlisle
- Rated
- 14A
- Screenwriter
- Damian McCarthy
- Composer
- Joseph Bishara
- Cinematography
- Colm Hogan, Stephen Murphy
- Editor
- Brian Philip Davis
- Country
- Language
- English
- Budget
- $5 million
- Box office
- $25.023 million
- Buy / rent (CA)
- Apple TV Store, Amazon Video