HOKUM (2026)

Studio:   Neon
Director: Damian McCarthy
Writer:   Damian McCarthy
Producer: Roy Lee, Steven Schneider, Derek Dauchy, Ruth Treacy, Julianna Forde, Mairtin de Barra
Stars:    Adam Scott, Peter Coonan, David Wilmot, Florence Ordesh, Michael Patric, Will O’Connell, Brendan Conroy, Ezra Carlisle, Austin Amelio

Review Score:

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Summary:

An author becomes embroiled in a murder mystery and confronts a dark family secret while visiting a secluded Irish hotel rumored to be haunted by a witch.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

For the conclusion of his highly anticipated “The Conquistador Trilogy,” author Ohm Bauman writes a tragic epilogue where a desperate conquistador searching for treasure buried in a harsh desert kills the boy accompanying him. Afterward, Ohm is frightened by a brief vision of his dead mother.

Inspired by a box of mementos containing a handgun, a postcard, and a photograph of his mother, Ohm decides to travel to Ireland to scatter his mother and father’s ashes at the secluded Bilberry Woods Hotel where they spent their honeymoon. Upon arriving, Ohm has a brief back-and-forth with hotel groundskeeper Fergal over Fergal killing an intrusive goat.

In the lobby, Ohm interrupts elderly hotel owner Mr. Cob telling two boys the tale of a witch, also known as Cailleach, who shackles lost travelers she subsequently escorts to the underworld. Mr. Cob’s son-in-law Mal checks Ohm into his room.

Despite his condescending rudeness, kindly hotel bartender Fiona helps Ohm locate his room. Fiona also tells Ohm where he can find the redwood tree pictured with his mother in the photograph from his parents’ honeymoon.

Ohm scatters his mother and father’s ashes at the tree. While in the woods, Ohm meets eccentric local Jerry, who lives in the forest. Ohm and Jerry bond a bit while discussing goats as well as the magic mushrooms Jerry farms for use in psychedelic milk.

Fiona serves whiskey to Ohm as he gets drunk at the hotel bar. Fiona questions Ohm’s tragic ending to his new novel. Ohm recounts how his parents honeymooned at the hotel, but his mother was murdered shortly thereafter, and his father became an abusive alcoholic. Fiona mentions the honeymoon suite has been permanently locked since Mr. Cob supposedly trapped the witch who haunts the hotel inside that room. In discussing the legend, folklore enthusiast Fiona adds that a chalk circle can protect a person from the witch.

Hotel bellhop Alby adds his own recollection of a paranormal encounter with the witch, which Ohm classifies as “hokum.” Identifying himself as a fan of Ohm’s work, Alby also brings up his ambition to become a writer. Ohm drunkenly insults Alby and purposely burns his hand with a hot spoon for bothering him.

Concerned about his drunkenness and wanting to return the tape recorder he left behind at the bar, Fiona has Alby unlock Ohm’s room to check on him later. Fiona immediately springs to save Ohm when she finds him hanging by a noose from the ceiling.

Following a few weeks of recovery in the hospital, Ohm returns to apologize to Fiona and collect his belongings only to find the hotel closing for the season. Mal informs Ohm that Fiona has been missing since the hotel’s Halloween party, and Jerry is the prime suspect in her disappearance. Mal adds that Jerry is also suspected of killing his wife, which is why he has been living alone in the woods for years.

Ohm asks Fergal if the honeymoon suite was part of the search for Fiona. A dismissive Fergal contends it would be impossible for Fiona to be there since the room is permanently locked.

Ohm returns to the woods to confront Jerry. Ohm finds Jerry in possession of Fiona’s folktale book, which Jerry claims was loaned to him because he and Fiona were friends. Jerry insists he had nothing to do with Fiona’s death, although he does admit to euthanizing his wife, which he claims was a mercy killing due to her suffering from a terminal illness.

Jerry further reveals that he went to the hotel to steal medicine and saw Fiona’s ghost beckoning to him from beneath a ringing service bell connected to the honeymoon suite. Thinking Fiona’s ghost was telling him to go up there, Jerry stole the suite key and now plans to unlock the room at night once everyone leaves the hotel. Jerry asks Ohm to come with him.

Jerry and Ohm sneak into the hotel, but Fergal captures Jerry and drives him away to hand over to the police. Now alone in the hotel, Ohm hears the honeymoon suite’s bell ring. In possession of Jerry’s key, Ohm unlocks the room.

Falling asleep on the suite’s bed, Ohm dreams a memory of accidentally shooting and killing his mother while idly playing with his father’s handgun during a children’s TV show featuring a jackass character named Jack. Mal wakes Ohm with an urgent request to leave. On their way out of the room, Ohm notices a concealed dumbwaiter in the wall. Over Mal’s objections, Ohm opens the dumbwaiter and finds Fiona’s dead body inside. Mal quickly locks Ohm in the room and speeds away from the hotel.

A flashback shows Fiona passing out from drugged tea during the hotel’s Halloween party. Mal then uses a wheelchair to escort Fiona to the honeymoon suite and trap her inside the dumbwaiter.

Ohm recovers his tape recorder from Fiona’s corpse. An audio message she left behind reveals Fiona was pregnant with Mal’s baby, and Mal wanted to silence the situation so his wife and father-in-law didn’t discover his infidelity. Ohm later hears what sounds like a woman taunting Fiona while she was trapped in the shaft between the suite and the hotel’s basement.

Jerry regains consciousness inside Fergal’s van. Despite the danger, Jerry jumps out of the moving vehicle.

Following another brief encounter with his mother’s ghost, a clip from the children’s TV show taunts Ohm about accidentally killing his mother, which also resulted in hatred from Ohm’s father. After rigging a mechanical clock to trigger the call button after a set amount of time, Ohm removes Fiona’s body and uses the dumbwaiter to descend into the basement.

At the end of a dank hallway, Ohm comes to a door covered in strange chalk markings. Ohm picks up a stick of chalk discarded on the ground before frightening noises compel him to rush back to the dumbwaiter. The clock hits the call button, and Ohm returns to the honeymoon suite when the timer expires.

Ohm sees a witch-life figure crawling up the shaft. Ohm quickly draws a chalk circle around the bed to protect himself.

Mal returns in the morning to find a blood trail leading from a car parked with its door open all the way to the hotel’s main elevator. At the end of the trail, Mal finds a severely injured Jerry attempting to get upstairs to rescue Ohm. Mal gets Jerry to stop by claiming Ohm left for the airport.

Ohm exits the chalk circle, sees the cars outside, and rings the honeymoon suite bell to alert Jerry. Jerry threatens Mal with a handax to obtain the suite key. Jerry unlocks the room, but Mal then shoots him in the head with a crossbow. A fire soon starts that begins spreading throughout the hotel.

Ohm takes the dumbwaiter back to the basement to escape Mal. Fearing the witch’s approach, Ohm begins drawing a chalk circle for safety, but he doesn’t complete it before the witch binds him with shackles. Mal follows Ohm into the basement only to also be shackled by the witch.

The witch ignores Ohm to pull Mal through the corridor. Sitting in his incomplete chalk circle, Ohm is visited by his mother’s ghost. Ohm apologizes to his mother, who forgives him for her accidental death. His spirit renewed, Ohm saws free from his restraints as he sees Mal pulled into a room full of ghouls.

Ohm makes it back up to the honeymoon suite. Fergal arrives at the burning hotel and rescues Ohm from the fire.

Alby visits Ohm as he recovers in the hospital. Alby reports that the police found Fiona and Jerry’s bodies, but not Mal’s. Alby also confesses that he took revenge for Ohm’s mistreatment of him by spiking Ohm’s whiskey with Jerry’s magic mushrooms. Staring at the shackle wounds on his wrists, Ohm contemplates if he hallucinated any part of his experience or if the psychedelics truly opened his mind to supernatural possibilities like Jerry claimed. Alby returns the photo of Ohm’s mother and says he will return to show Ohm his manuscript.

Ohm rewrites his latest book’s epilogue so that instead of killing the boy, the conquistador instructs the boy to kill him and follow the treasure map alone. The boy raises a bottle to smash over the conquistador’s head, but he throws the bottle away and embraces the conquistador instead. The bottle lands in the sand next to a goat’s skull.

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Review:

Aided by spot-on casting to complement their clean and clear characterizations, “Hokum” sets up the eclectic lot populating Ireland’s secluded Bilberry Woods Hotel quickly. No-nonsense groundskeeper Fergal doesn’t hesitate to fire his crossbow into a troublesome goat plaguing the premises. Meek beanpole Alby toils as a dutiful bellhop, yet he privately yearns to become a writer. Inside the hotel, desk clerk Mal fears his formidable father-in-law Mr. Cob, the property’s eccentric owner who is pleased as punch to terrify two boys with tales of a witch supposedly locked in the honeymoon suite. Kindly bartender Fiona, whose easygoing personality can soften hard hearts, believes more than a few of those folktales. So does bearded weirdo Jerry, a local loon who lives alone in a nearby forest where he farms his own magic mushrooms.

But the movie’s main player is Ohm Bauman, a caustic author played by Adam Scott. Don’t expect to see the actor on his best behavior. Ohm is far from the quirky, comical types Scott plays in projects like “Parks and Recreation,” or even the affable Everyman he embodies on “Severance.” Constantly condescending, Ohm challenges Fergal’s goat slaughter as an unnecessary action, interrupts Mr. Cob’s storytelling to warn the boys they shouldn’t talk to strangers, and adds injury to insult by intentionally burning Alby’s hand for being momentarily inconvenienced by the bellhop’s flattering banter.

Despite him responding with a sarcastic “what does it look like?” when she asks if he’s lost, Fiona helps Ohm pinpoint a particular tree in the forest and he starts easing up his confrontational attitude. The reason Ohm came to Ireland in the first place is because he recently finished his highly anticipated new novel, albeit with a bleak ending, and a quick flash of his mother’s ghost inspired him to scatter his parents’ ashes at the place where they spent their honeymoon.

Since “Hokum” is a horror movie, this is only the beginning of Ohm’s bizarre experience at the Bilberry Woods Hotel. After a shocking incident lands him in the hospital, Ohm returns to the hotel to learn an employee went missing. They aren’t the first person to meet a mysterious fate either. The only place that hasn’t been searched is the honeymoon suite, because it’s been permanently shuttered since Mr. Cob purportedly trapped the witch in there. Ohm decides to do some digging on his own. What he ends up discovering is one secret someone desperately wants to remain hidden, and another that will force Ohm to face a tragic truth about his family, if he can survive the witch’s wrath along the way.

Having previously paved this path with 2020’s “Caveat” (review here) and then “Oddity” in 2024 (review here), Damian McCarthy’s third feature “Hokum” shows the filmmaker fine-tuning his personal formula for disturbing descents into darkness even further. His keen sense for combining urban legend lore and a woodland countryside setting with grim themes about guilt and modern movie flourishes makes for carefully crafted folk horror that manages the feat of feeling both classic and contemporary at the same time.

That texture develops out of “Hokum’s” ability to balance between two similar yet distinct tones depending on how a given scene wants to stir up a scare. The throughline always ties back to the myth of the witch and how she seems to be a part of evil events within the hotel’s walls, but there are also the other plots involving Ohm’s haunted history and the possible murder conspiracy going on in the meantime. By not relying solely on psychological dread over physical frights or vice versa, the film’s slow burn has free reign to plume the smoking suspense of cerebral dread from suggestive images and audio while more tangible terrors develop out of direct dangers and threats. Some of those moments aren’t all the way on the James Wan scale of being spectacularly stylized, but they aren’t cheap jumps either.

Although “Hokum” maintains a much faster pace than “Caveat” and “Oddity,” viewers who weren’t synched to the speed of those films may find themselves similarly halted here. Admirers of those movies, on the other hand, have an opposite experience in store as Damian McCarthy takes the lessons learned on those outings to dial up “Hokum’s” horror even higher. Covered in a macabre mood, “Hokum” has more than mere atmosphere to offer as it evolves into a self-contained creeper that’s quickly cementing McCarthy as a master of effective, artistic, and unsettling eeriness.

Review Score: 75

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