Following his breakout indie hits Caveat (2020) and Oddity (2024), Irish writer-director Damian McCarthy firmly cemented his status as a modern master of atmospheric dread with his 2026 supernatural horror film, Hokum.
Distributed in the United States by Neon after a highly praised premiere at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Film & TV Festival on March 14, 2026, Hokum combines eerie Irish folklore, classic haunted-hotel tropes, and a razor-sharp, cynical lead performance from Adam Scott. Produced on a modest budget of $5 million, the film resonated heavily with both critics and genre fans, grossing over $24.1 million worldwide during its theatrical run.
Plot Overview
The film follows Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott), a celebrated, Stephen King-adjacent horror novelist famous for his incredibly bleak endings and an equally low opinion of humanity. Ohm is severely struggling to pen the conclusion to his highly anticipated Conquistador book trilogy. Seeking inspiration and a sense of closure, he travels to rural West Cork, Ireland, to visit The Bilberry Woods Hotel—the remote inn where his late parents spent their honeymoon—to finally scatter their ashes.
Arriving just in time for Halloween weekend, the deeply skeptical and curmudgeonly Ohm dismisses the local eccentricities and the staff’s unsettling warnings. The hotel’s aging owner, Cob (Brendan Conroy), and the staff share chilling local lore about the Cailleach, an ancient witch who traps children and drags them through the underworld. More pressingly, they warn Ohm about the hotel’s boarded-up, strictly locked honeymoon suite, which is said to house the very witch Cob supposedly trapped inside decades ago.
Ohm’s stubborn skepticism is shattered when the hotel shuts down for the season and a hotel staff member, Fiona (Florence Ordesh), mysteriously vanishes. Teaming up with Jerry (David Wilmot), a local man who becomes a prime suspect in the disappearance, Ohm breaks into the sealed honeymoon suite to investigate. There, the film shifts from a missing-person whodunit into a claustrophobic nightmare. Ohm is forced to confront terrifying supernatural manifestations alongside a buried, extreme childhood trauma: the realization that he accidentally shot and killed his own mother with his father’s gun when he was a boy.
Cast and Characters
- Adam Scott as Ohm Bauman: In a departure from his usual roles, Scott delivers a layered, deeply compelling performance as a bitter, alcoholic writer whose prickly exterior masks immense psychological guilt.
- David Wilmot as Jerry: A local man wrapped up in the hotel’s dark history who provides a brilliant, occasionally humorous counterweight to Ohm’s intense skepticism.
- Brendan Conroy as Cob: The weathered, lore-dropping owner of The Bilberry Woods Hotel.
- Florence Ordesh as Fiona: A hotel staff member whose sudden disappearance drives the movie’s second-half mystery.
- Austin Amelio as The Conquistador: The imposing, physical manifestation of the lead character from Ohm’s own dark novels.
- Will O’Connell as Jack the Jackass: A creepy children’s television show character who bleeds into Ohm’s psychological horrors.
Production and Style
Hokum is an international co-production between Image Nation, Tailored Films, and Spooky Pictures, with genre veterans Roy Lee and Steven Schneider serving as producers.
McCarthy once again collaborated with cinematographer Cole Hogan to craft the film’s distinctive, claustrophobic visual language. Much like Caveat and Oddity, Hokum relies heavily on practical space, rich shadows, and a lived-in, palpably decaying environment. Rather than relying on constant digital visual effects, McCarthy utilizes meticulously timed practical jump scares, slow pans, and structural geometry—frequently compared by critics to a subtler, more folk-lore-driven version of Stephen King’s 1408 or Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
Critical Reception and Themes
Hokum received overwhelmingly positive reviews, holding a 90% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on nearly 200 reviews, and an 81/100 on Metacritic. Critics widely praised McCarthy’s ability to externalize heavy psychological themes through supernatural terror.
Key Themes Analysed by Critics:
- The Anatomy of Guilt: At its core, the film acts as an exploration of how unaddressed trauma and grief morph into monsters. The “witch” in the locked room ultimately mirrors the locked-away memories of Ohm’s childhood.
- Storytelling as Healing: Because Ohm is a writer known for crafting suffering, the narrative explores whether storytelling is a tool to escape reality or a vehicle to safely confront it.
- Critiques on Structure: While mostly praised, a subset of horror enthusiasts noted that the film’s structural shifts—moving rapidly from an alcoholic character study to folk horror, then a missing-person mystery, and finally a locked-room thriller—can occasionally feel disjointed. However, most agreed that Adam Scott’s anchoring performance holds the shifting narrative blocks together effectively, culminating in an uncharacteristically moving, hard-earned moment of grace at the finale.
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