‘Hokum’ Review: We’re Checked In To This Haunted Irish Hotel Horror Starring Adam Scott

We’re big fans of Damian McCarthy’s Oddity over here at Screen Love Affair. It was easily one of the best movie theatre experiences we had back when we saw it at Fantasia in 2024. So expectations were high for McCarthy’s third feature, Hokum.

With each film, McCarthy has upped the ante, and this is no different, with a bigger budget, a bigger star in Adam Scott, and bigger distribution courtesy of Neon. But does Hokum deliver?

Well, it never quite reached the heights that Oddity did for me, but nevertheless I loved it. I do wonder how much of that comes down to the contagious energy of a Fantasia Festival crowd, which was missing here.

Still, I had a blast watching this. I will admit that I’m the exact kind of person this movie was made for. I’ve always loved ghost stories and been enamored with the way horror can excavate both the extremes of human darkness and the depths of human emotion.

In Hokum, as in Oddity, McCarthy does so through the lens of Irish folklore and the contained powder keg of a single haunted location.

The movie follows Scott’s Ohm Bauman, a successful yet depressed alcoholic writer, who visits a small hotel in Ireland to finish his latest novel and put his deceased parents to rest.

If the setup of a writer holing away in a remote hotel until things begin to unravel sounds familiar, well the movie deliberately riffs not just on The Shining but also another Stephen King touchstone, 1408. Yet, Hokum still feels fresh and entirely its own.

Part of that comes down to its setting and its rootedness in Irish folklore. McCarthy imbues the movie with the tone and sensibility of a supernatural parable or Gothic folk tale.

It’s a story about storytelling and the way that stories, like folk tales or novels, can help us process feelings like grief and guilt and heal our wounds. I loved the framing device and thought it was a really unique way to structure a horror movie.

There’s a similarly dark sense of humour and cynicism lurking here as there was in Oddity, but Hokum offers a bit more hope, too. I’m a sucker for stories about traumatized, grieving oddballs finding some kind of kinship with one another, even if only temporarily.

Not everything here fully works, however. Bauman is such an overt asshole at the beginning that it almost beggars belief, though it does provide a lot of the movie’s early humour. And his tragic backstory is also very dark and only glancingly drawn, so the emotional climax of the movie doesn’t totally land.

But when the movie gets to the extended spooky puzzle box it’s been building toward, it delivers one of the best contained horror set-pieces in recent memory. This is where the movie truly sings. And it’s where Hokum had me like putty in its hand, along for the ride with Adam Scott’s character with no way to get off.

The first half of the film is really just place-setting for that exquisite third act. It takes its time getting all the pieces in place, and some of that definitely feels disjointed and lacking in scares. But boy is that third act an all-timer, proving that McCarthy truly has the goods. He just understands how to build atmosphere and tension—and when exactly to release it.

Verdict

Hokum isn’t perfect, but if you like atmospheric folklore-laden supernatural ghost stories, the movie has a lot going for it. Despite some disjointed character work and plotting, the spooky core of the film—rooted in masterful performances, a killer setting, and the fundamentals of horror craft—is one for the books.