Movies & TV Hokum Hokum Is Much More Than a Haunted Hotel Movie And yes, there are creepy bunnies. By Leah Schnelbach | Published on May 1, 2026 Credit: Neon Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Neon You can tell the horror movie’s really kicked into another gear when the audience starts whimpering. I’ve seen Hokum twice now, both times in packed theaters, and both times there was whimpering. I recommend you see it in as full a theater as you safely can, knowing as little as you can. Here, in these opening paragraphs, I’m going to sketch in an incredibly faint chalk outline of facts, and then, after a spoiler line, a slightly more in-depth discussion of the film’s themes. But I really don’t want to give anything important away here. By way of a logline: Adam Scott plays Ohm Bauman, a bestselling author who’s stuck on the ending to his hit trilogy. He embraces the way of the writer—procrastination and alcohol—and travels to the Bilberry Woods Hotel in Ireland, where his parents spent their honeymoon. He can get away from his book, drink at the bar, and spread his folks’ ashes in a place they loved. This part of the plot is set up and dispensed with in about the first 8 minutes of the movie, leaving Ohm free to fall into the real plot: the hotel has a dark secret. This is Damian McCarthy’s third feature, following Caveat and Oddity, which were each fantastic in their own ways, and if you know those movies and love them like I do, you’ll most likely also love Hokum—but this will also make for an excellent introduction to McCarthy’s work if you’re new to it. I love that he seems to be creating his own world through tone and theme, rather than trying to do overworked, airless tie-ins like some cinematic universes I could mention. Fans of those prior films will see themes and objects recur (more on that in the very light spoiler section below) but all of it’s used in a way that serves this story, not as a cheap callback. While Hokum has a Hollywood star in Adam Scott, and wider distribution through Neon, the soul of the film feels very much of a piece with his earlier work. Adam Scott is so good as Ohm. Obviously, Adam Scott is always good—but Ohm allows him to show new facets of himself, and gives him an arc that really feels like a journey. Without giving anything away I’ll say that McCarthy made a really cool choice for the character, and Scott inhabits it perfectly. Courtesy of Neon The cast of characters is small and insular, but all feel like three-dimensional people. There’s gruff, goat-hating handyman Fergal (Michael Patric); nervous desk clerk, Mal (Peter Coonan) who’s also the son-in-law of the ancient owner of the Bilberry Woods, Mr. Cobb (Brendan Conroy)—which accounts for some of Mal’s nervousness; a rather hapless bellhop named Alby (Will O’Connell) and a bartender, Fiona (Florence Ordesh), round out the staff. And then there’s Jerry (David Wilmot) a reclusive local man who lives in a van in the forest. They each get a few moments to shine, but for the most part this is Ohm’s story. Hokum’s atmosphere is folk horror perfection. We’re in West Cork, Ireland, near where the the last bit of Ireland’s temperate rainforest stands. (It’s a similar setting to The Watchers, which, despite the always-welcome presence of Olwen Fouéré, couldn’t quite pull its folk horror off. Luckily, Hokum succeeds beautifully.) Production Designer Til Frohlich has given us an excellent horror hotel—if you look at it from the outside it’s a rambling building tucked into the woods, and once you’re inside it seems just a little too worn to still be fancy. But the longer you stay the more it feels like there are things watching from the shadows. The film’s Director of Photography, Colm Hogan, does incredible things with light—his shadows fucking seethe, single lamps and torches flare in and out and create tiny pockets of light that are almost worse than darkness. When the sun sets it’s pitch black. The forest is thick, and there are no other houses or signs of civilization within site of the hotel itself—so if you spend a night alone there, you are, truly, alone. Hopefully. I also want to shout out Hokum’s editor Brian Philip Davis—this is a short, compact film with a lot of well-times jump scares, and those scares, and the breathing room around them, are calibrated beautifully. The jump scares work toward a purpose, they’re not just a poke between the ribs. And composer Joseph Bishara creates an atmosphere of dread that will probably become my own go-to writing soundtrack. Here’s where we draw a chalk circle around some very light spoilers! Click here to skip past them. Credit: Neon If you’ve seen and loved Caveat and/or Oddity (I love both in different ways) you’ll be pleased to hear that McCarthy has returned to his resonant objects. A desk bell is heavily featured, as is a crossbow, ropes and chains, upsetting bunnies , chalk, and the See/Hear/Speak No Evil motif. The most exciting for me was a book whose author seems to be, if I read it correctly, a certain “D. Odello.” I’m guessing there are more that I missed. As in the last two films, these objects gradually gain heft and meaning as the story creeps along. He has also revisited one of his biggest themes in a new and horrifying way, but again, to say anything more is to say too much. And that’s it for anything remotely spoiler-y. As for outside influences, the film relies on shadows, creaks, and atmosphere more than gore or violence, and the Bilberry feels like an homage to The Haunting of Hill House, The Innocents, and fellow Irish horror writer Dorothy McArdle’s The Uninvited. And you can’t really heck a writer into a hotel with a secret without invoking The Shining and 1408. The fact that Ohm Bauman is a hugely successful, famous author of a book series that feels a lot like The Dark Tower series only adds to the Stephen King riff. But again, Hokum is in a side conversation with all of those things—the slight allusions never overpower the story McCarthy tells. Credit: Neon There are a lot of exquisite details in this film, but there are two in particular that would have made me shriek with happiness if I hadn’t been in a room with other people. If I write about this film once it’s been out for a bit, as I suspect I will, I’ll get into them later. I also love that McCarthy isn’t offering up Irish kitsch. The hotel does that, with its blaring Halloween party and carved grimacing turnips glimmering in every corner for the amusement of the (presumably non-Irish) guests. But the movie just drops Adam Scott into this world, and doesn’t give him any explanation beyond the fact that “craic” means “fun” …kind of. He butts up against local customs, folklore, and even the liquor, and no one gives him an inch. There’s a very brief use of ogham script in the movie that made my tattoo prickle, and a celebration of poitín that makes me regret my decision not to buy more at the Duty Free shop when I left Dublin. Next time, Dublin Airport Duty Free shop. Next time. As in his earlier work, there are a lot of churning ideas about guilt, forgiveness, and purgatorial in-between spaces here—in this case an extremely claustrophobic space. Once you know the shape of the main hotel suite (just as with 1408), you know exactly how impossible it is to escape. And then there’s the title. Another throughline in McCarthy’s work is the skeptical outsider who scoffs at folklore, superstition, belief in general. Here McCarthy ups the ante by making that character a visitor from the U.S., and someone who makes his money from horror novels, so not only is he treating Irish culture as a thing he can watch from outside (even after he’s very much trapped inside), he also sees himself as someone who knows the tricks of a spooky story. But they’re only tricks if the story is fictional. Credit: Neon I’ve talked elsewhere about Irish horror, and there are plenty of psychoanalysis-type reasons that Ireland is particularly good at the genre—its history is riddled with trauma, its people have had to fight for everything—and they’re still fighting—and the cultures of storytelling, song, and writing all mine deep veins of ghosts, witches, and curses both supernatural and banal. I don’t think it’s an accident that Damian McCarthy’s previous films feature a landlord and an English dude as antagonists, that Aislinn Clarke’s films The Devil’s Doorway and Fréwaka revolve around Magdalene Laundries and inter-generational trauma, that Paul Duane’s All You Need Is Death is about desperate immigrant youths scrambling to sell “authenticity” on the black market because it’s the only way to stay above water. But what I love about a lot of these films is that none of them ever boil all the way down to “the villain became a murderer because of his shitty father” or “the real monster is SOCIETY’S HATRED OF WOMEN”—sure that’s usually part of it, but these films allow room for nuance, mystery, the uncanny. Sometimes monsters just ARE. Sometimes things that seem like monsters to our human eyes are actually beautiful. Maybe the supernatural elements are “real” and maybe they aren’t—it doesn’t matter when the the story’s good enough. And that’s what Hokum is doing. You can treat it like a math problem, you can get annoyed when certain questions aren’t answered (or give you several different answers to choose from) but I think if you do that, you deny yourself the story McCarthy and his team are offering you—a story that ends up being the best horror of the year so far.[end-mark] The post <em>Hokum</em> Is Much More Than a Haunted Hotel Movie appeared first on Reactor.