Review: Hokum

There’s something inherently promising about a filmmaker who understands that a setting can do as much storytelling as any line of dialogue. Damian McCarthy, coming off the slow-burn unease of Caveat and Oddity, clearly gets that. With Hokum, he trades in those tighter, more controlled chambers of dread for something a bit grander, a creaky, half-forgotten Irish hotel that feels less like a location and more like a living accusation. For long stretches, it’s enough to carry the film on atmosphere alone. Unfortunately, Hokum can’t resist some of McCarthy's sentimental worst tendencies.

Adam Scott plays Ohn Bauman, an American novelist who arrives in rural West Cork with a suitcase full of ashes and a personality that curdles the air around him. Scott, who has made a late-career pivot into playing tightly wound men unraveling at the seams, is working in a familiar register here, but it’s an effective one. Bauman is prickly, self-important, and casually cruel, the kind of man who treats grief like a personal inconvenience and everyone else like they’re in the way of it. It’s not always pleasant to watch, but it’s compelling, and Scott commits fully to the character’s slow psychological erosion.

The Bilberry Woods Hotel does most of the heavy lifting early on. McCarthy shoots it like a place out of time, dim corridors, dated décor, elevators that feel like they shouldn’t still be operational but somehow are. There’s a tactile quality to the environment that recalls The Shining by way of The Others, but without feeling like outright imitation. The details matter: the old call bells behind the front desk, the staff uniforms that feel slightly out of step with reality, the way sound carries (or doesn’t) through the walls. Even before anything overtly supernatural happens, the hotel feels wrong.

And for a while, Hokum trusts that wrongness. The first act plays like a moody, borderline miserable character study, with Bauman picking fights at the bar, brushing off local folklore, and spiraling inward. When the film awkwardly pivots toward its central mystery, a mix of murder, memory, and whatever exactly is lurking in that off-limits honeymoon suite, it finds an intriguing groove. There’s a genuine sense that McCarthy might be building toward something more psychological than supernatural, something rooted in guilt rather than ghosts.

That’s the version of Hokum that works.

The problem is that it’s not the version we ultimately get.

As the film progresses, Mc Carthy begins layering on elements that feel increasingly at odds with what he’s already established. The whodunnit structure gets buried under folklore, which gets buried under more overt horror mechanics, jump scares, shadowy figures, things that go bump in precisely the way you expect them to. Joseph Bishara’s score does a lot of the heavy lifting here, all whispering voices and low, vibrating dread, but even that starts to feel like it’s compensating for a film that’s losing its nerve.

There’s a particularly frustrating shift when Hokum begins to literalize its horror. What starts as internal, Bauman confronting past trauma, regret, the kind of rot that settles in quietly, becomes external in the most familiar ways possible. Witches, hauntings, suggestions of something demonic just beneath the surface. It’s not that these elements are inherently bad; it’s that they feel like a retreat from the more interesting, more uncomfortable version of the story McCarthy was telling. Still McCarthy is such a skillful director that this middle sequence taken on its own is the stuff horror fans love. It is impressive if ultimately at odds with the rest of the film.

McCarthy has an eye for composition that keeps the film watchable long after it’s stopped being particularly surprising. There are images here that linger, a figure half-seen at the end of a hallway, the claustrophobic churn of an elevator ride that feels like it’s descending somewhere it shouldn’t, the way the hotel seems to rearrange itself just slightly when no one is looking. These moments hint at a filmmaker still very much in control of tone, even if the narrative itself is slipping.

In the end, Hokum lands in that frustrating middle ground: a film that is consistently well-crafted on a technical level but undermined by its own lack of restraint. It’s easy to admire, the atmosphere, the performances, the confidence behind the camera, but harder to fully embrace.

Mc Carthy remains a filmmaker worth watching. You can see the better version of this movie in flashes, buried beneath the noise. It’s the one where the hotel is enough, where the horror stays personal, where the past doesn’t need a demon to make it hurt.

3/5