Hokum (2026)

Score: 4 / 5

Damian McCarthy has carved out a nasty little niche for himself as a successful auteur, and Hokum is only the third feature-length example of his genius. The Irish filmmaker blew most of us out of the water with his mystery-thriller Caveat and the opening scene of his sophomore film Oddity still gives me nightmares. Combining a contemporary sense of horror timing with timeless Gothic premises, McCarthy's work insightfully scares us, building on a rich sense of place and utilizing an almost primal sense of justice (no religion, per se, not even pagan) to undergird his haunting traps.

And traps they are: each of his films features a single location that contains most of the film's plot, usually with some contrived means of isolating the character so they must battle both inner and outer horrors and, hopefully, emerge better. McCarthy is also a new champion of folk horror, pushing the genre in a direction ripe for theorization. In his stories, the real monsters are humans: corrupted by avarice and externalized insecurities, bad people cover up murder and sundry crimes that unearth or catalyze hauntings. When the troubled protagonist arrives, we're on a journey with him to separate the supernatural from the criminal and bring both justice and peace back to the setting. And, crucially, in McCarthy, the protagonist only makes it with some help from the reliably kind if strange locals. While I didn't care as much for Hokum as Oddity, it fits the bill and managed to scare, delight, and haunt me each of the now three times I've seen it.

So if all this sounds of interest to you, I beseech you to stop reading and watch the film. Part of its pleasure, as a bonafide mystery, is to unravel its plot points, characterizations, and thematic subtleties as you go. But, if you've already seen it or are find with spoilers, let's get into it.

Did I already say there's a contrived plot to get the protagonist to the haunting? Well, here it's even worse than in McCarthy's previous two films. An American writer struggling to finish the end of his trilogy, Ohm Bauman (a troubled and caustic author played by Adam Scott with remarkable sobriety and nuance) books a trip to rural Ireland to dispose of his parents' ashes. Apparently they honeymooned at this remote hotel, so he dumps their ashes at a redwood tree featured in a picture of his beloved mother (I should say that he unceremoniously dumps Dad's ashes, but Mom's are lovingly poured out along the roots). His mother's cause of death from many years prior will be revealed in the film's thematic slow burn, but his alcoholic and abusive father's past is mentioned more fleetingly. 

Other than thematically, the film is by no means a slow burn. Starting with an often humorous flavor, the film introduces us to the quirky people working at the hotel, including a surly groundskeeper slaughtering pesky goats, a creepy wheelchair-bound owner telling ghost stories, the performative and put-upon front desk clerk (and son-in-law of the owner), and the insightful bartender Fiona (Florence Ordesh). We get a brief indication that there are local legends of a witch who kidnaps naughty children and leads them in chains through the underworld, but that's surely just a spooky Halloween tale. Indeed, Ohm has arrived on October 30, and a party is about to commence.

Ohm himself, however, is the real character of this film. Gruff and rude to the people around him, he is the kind of person who seems eager to make enemies at every turn. Whether it's the possibly predatory owner of the hotel or a rather pushy bellboy who wants Ohm to read his manuscript, Ohm reacts with funny yet disturbing cruelty to the staff. Actually, he's not a far cry from Stephen King autobiographical caricatures in his own books, like in The Shining or 1409, two stories that seem consciously referenced in Hokum. Curiously, the only person Ohm treats decently is Jerry, a local hermit living off the grid who he meets in the forest; Jerry, high on psychedelic mushrooms that allow him to experience the supernatural world (so he says), provides Ohm with some moonshine, and the two bond in what is easily the film's sweetest scene. It helps, too, that David Wilmot's performance as Jerry is a knockout jolt of energy that this film sorely needs.

Well, that, and the time jump. Ohm tries to kill himself on Halloween Eve and is found and rescued by Fiona and the bellboy. We leap ahead to apparently some days later when Ohm returns to the hotel to collect his belongings, discovering that the hotel is in the process of closing for the season. Fiona, it seems, has been missing since the party, and Jerry is the prime suspect. Confronting Jerry, Ohm learns of his suspicion that Fiona's corpse is still in the hotel (he saw her ghost, you see) and that someone who worked there is guilty of the cover-up. After the staff leave, they break in and locate the Honeymoon Suite, where the ghost directed Jerry to look: a boarded up suite under lock and key due to its status as supposedly haunted by the local witch.

When Jerry is dispatched temporarily by the groundskeeper, Ohm is left alone for the night to explore the hotel, and things get scary fast. The filmmakers highlight long, dusty hallways, hidden doors, disused accoutrements, and negative space with electrifying energy, drawing our eyes with insidious intent into shadowy corners and gaping, dark frames. Like the best of Chekhovian theatre or a cinematic chamber piece, each element of design will have some role to play in the subsequent cat-and-mouse series of encounters between human and inhuman threats, from the dumbwaiter and its time-sensitive mechanics certain to cause logistical problems to the bathtub filled with brown and chunky, unspeakably fetid water. Even elements outside the hotel itself have purpose, with interconnectedness in plot points and theme extending to the goats, the mushrooms, and even the conquistador that opens and closes the film (a character from Ohm's trilogy that offers perhaps too many psychoanalytic and symbolic insights into Ohm's character).

Even with Joseph Bishara's incredible score, this film never feels too big for it britches. We're meant to buy into its mythos and the possibilities of boundaries between reality and horror becoming blurred. We're meant to understand and honor the arcane, spiritual significance of solving a murder for the good of the community. And so, like fairytales and fables that teeter toward darker subject matter, this film guides us into Ohm's own darkness so that we experience a catharsis along with him. No jokes, no grotesque style, just an earnest ghost story that's deadly serious.