Damian McCarthy’s Hokum is a nasty, funny, tightly constructed ghost story that takes a classic Stephen King-style setup (a drunk, crotchety horror writer investigates a mystery at a haunted hotel) and turns it into something strange and dark – the best ghost story of the year.
★★★★★
If you like ghost stories in the Stephen King tradition, you will have a very good time with Hokum, a sinister shaggy dog yarn about a drunk, cynical novelist investigating a disappearance at a remote Irish inn.
Adam Scott plays novelist Ohm Bauman, and Ohm is not having a good time. He should be finishing off his acclaimed ‘Conquistador Trilogy’, but instead he’s drinking, seeing spectral figures in the shadows, and playing with a gun he keeps in an old wooden box. He’s a troubled man, but his troubles are only just beginning.
When Ohm heads off to an Irish countryside hotel to pour out his parents’ ashes, he finds himself embroiled in a twin mystery. First, the honeymoon suite where his parents once stayed has been sealed off because, he is told, there is a witch trapped in there. Second, the barmaid from the hotel disappears. From these beginnings McCarthy engineers a three-way pile up, with Ohm’s personal haunting, the hidden witch, and the missing barmaid forming three narrative trains that McCarthy races towards each other before delivering an explosive climax.
McCarthy wastes little time establishing what sort of man Ohm is. He is not an inviting guide into the story but a cynic, a sceptic and an asshole, the sort of character who meets every strange occurrence or seeming irrational utterance with contemptuous snark, before slowly being dragged into the machinations of the tale. Eventually he no longer knows who, or what, to trust. Rather than asking the audience to sympathise with him too easily, Hokum lets him stay abrasive and difficult, then turns that abrasiveness on the dark forces at work, so that we come to cheer him on. This is the best Adam Scott has ever been, leaning into the character’s brittleness and bad attitude without sanding off the uglier edges.
To talk about what he’s up against would give away too much, but I recommend you find yourself someone who looks at you like Damian McCarthy looks at rabbit imagery. When things come for Ohm, in the dark, in his terror, in the honeymoon suite (you knew he was breaking in at some point)… yes, his sanity and life come under attack from multiple directions, and there is more than one set of rabbit ears involved.
This is a classically constructed haunted hotel story, layering various forms of evil and trauma on top of one another, so that they shine through each other. The Stephen King comparisons are obvious, but more than just superficial – this is not simply a film about a drunk writer in a creepy hotel with a special room. It works in a recognisable King mode, where grief, drink, buried family damage and the supernatural all start pressing on the same weak spots until they become impossible to separate. The past does not sit politely in the background here, but keeps forcing its way back in. The haunted space is not just spooky décor, but a mechanism for making what has been suppressed impossible to ignore.
McCarthy’s great strength remains control. As in Caveat and Oddity, he knows how to build dread out of stillness, darkness and the suggestion that something terrible may already be in the frame waiting for you to notice it. This is not a film trying to reinvent horror, but perfect it – one that understands exactly where to place a scare, when to show you something, and when to leave you straining into the dark.
This is a film about keeping a light burning in the darkness, of fighting against the void, fighting to live. McCarthy lets us feel the dark energy eating into the place, the pleasure of watching a hostile man slowly run out of rational footholds and take the plunge into the unknown, and he knows exactly how much folklore to feed us before letting it recede into ambiguity.
Hokum is a very satisfying example of this kind of thing – a haunted hotel story, a mystery, an Irish folk chiller, a Stephen King-ish drunk-writer yarn. Most importantly, Hokum is creepy in all the right ways – it tightens the screws and never lets go. McCarthy is Ireland’s king of terror, and he has made a sinister little bastard of a film, with Adam Scott right at home in its dark heart.
Hokum played at the Overlook Film Festival in New Orleans and is in cinemas in the US and UK from 1 May 2026.
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