Written and directed by Damian McCarthy, Hokum is anything but.
The nightmare stars Adam Scott as Ohm Bauman, an author carrying around more than just the expectations of an upcoming book. As he struggles with how his well-known book series will end, Bauman is faced with an even more daunting task- coming to terms with his parents’ deaths. The film opens with Ohm working on his novel in a dimly lit writing area with a specter lurking on the staircase and then directly behind him after he opens a box of personal belongings that includes a handgun and a photo of his mother.
Ohm sets out to visit The Bilberry Woods Hotel, a quaint inn somewhere in the woods of Ireland. This also happens to be where Ohm’s parents honeymooned several years earlier. The plan is to spread his parents’ ashes near the inn and finish his book in peace.
Upon arriving at the hotel, Ohm quickly grows tired of the local cast of characters who are employed by the inn. The property’s owner is an older gentleman who introduces audiences to the tale of the witch in the area. He is telling this folklore, quite enthusiastically, to a pair of young boys as Ohm enters the inn. Ohm brushes off the story as bullshit, chastising the old man for telling a story that may or may not be scaring the ever-loving shit out of a pair of boys.
As if that weren’t enough to get under Ohm’s skin, he also quickly gets agitated by the presence of Alby, a kind albeit slightly oblivious bellboy who asks Ohm to read his manuscript. Mal, the front desk clerk, recognizes Ohm’s name and grates on the author before he even checks in.
Scott plays this role of a famous author who is struggling with his latest project while balancing personal trauma spectacularly, much in the same spirit of the classic ghost stories of a long-lost era, when academics and skeptics met anyone who believed in the supernatural with an annoyance that borders on disgust.
In this case, Alby meets the business end of a heated spoon when Ohm insists that the poor guy will need thick skin if he’s going to make it as a writer.
Ohm takes a liking to the bartender Fiona, who listens to Ohm talk about his book and briefly discusses personal tragedy that clearly still gnaws at the author. We learn that both of Ohm’s parents met tragic demises, with Ohm squarely in the middle of the heartache.
The woods where Ohm sets out to spread his parents’ ashes are completely isolated, save for the star of the movie, a wanderer named Jerry. The bearded fellow spends most of his days keeping the area’s goats at bay while feeling like something isn’t quite right about the inn. He has his own stories about the woods surrounding the property and he’s also grappling with hte loss of his own wife. To cope, Jerry fancies a glass jar of goat’s milk mixed with hallucinogenic mushrooms that he grows himself.
It doesn’t take long for Ohm to learn of the lore surrounding The Bilberry Woods Hotel. According to legend, there’s a witch locked up in the honeymoon suite of the inn. This keeps the suite under lock and key at all times, forbidden to be rented out. Alby tells the story of encountering the witch firsthand one night while manning the station outside of the suite, and this is the first partial viewing audiences get of the witch. Ohm, in between sips of whiskey, pays him no mind, rejecting the tale as “hokum”.
As the stress of the book, the weight of his mother’s death and a constant flow of alcohol consumes Ohm, he morosely makes his way back to his room, but forgets a few personal belongings at the bar counter. Fiona convinces Alby to open the locked door when there’s no answer from Ohm, and Fiona is mortified to find Ohm hanging from the ceiling.
The film cuts to Ohm in a hospital bed during his recovery and he soon learns that Fiona has gone missing from the hotel. Allegedly, she hadn’t been seen since the inn’s Halloween party and it’s rumored that Jerry is the one responsible for the disappearance. Ohm takes it upon himself to track Jerry down in the woods and insist that they go to the police, but Jerry is hesitant. He insists the police won’t believe him if he tells them the true story of what happened to Fiona. He saw her in a dream, you see.
Jerry shudders and grows misty-eyed while he talks about what he knows to be true about Fiona’s disappearance, insisting the kind-hearted bartender is dead. He believes she, somehow, ended up in the honeymoon suite but can’t quite put the pieces together as to the how or why. With a newfound lease on life and a genuine concern for the woman who saved him, Ohm agrees to visit the hotel later that night with Jerry so they can check out the honeymoon suite for themselves.
With the hotel closed off for the season, Jerry and Ohm wait for the last of the staff to leave the property before sneaking in- only for their plan to be thwarted rather quickly. Jerry goes to retrieve the crossbow in the employee’s back room for protection, and Fergal, the surly groundskeeper who believes he’s responsible for Fiona’s disappearance, surprises him with a headlock into submission.
This leaves Ohm to unlock the honeymoon suite by himself. It doesn’t take long for his mother’s apparition to begin to appear this is where we learn what happened to Ohm’s beloved mom. It’s a gut-wrenching turn, one we’ve seen before in horror films, but it is done quite well here. Audiences learn that a young Ohm accidentally shot his mother when she was coming into the home one evening, using his father’s gun that was not properly locked away. Scott’s brilliant portrayal of Ohm makes the reveal all the more crushing.
Mal wakes Ohm up the next morning, arriving at the hotel at the insistence of his father-in-law, the owner of the inn, who realized the key to the honeymoon suite was missing. Ohm is ready to leave the hotel for good, but notices a small door is slightly opened on the other side of the room. Mal suggests Ohm get out of the hotel as quickly as possible, as the owner is quite strict about the forbidden honeymoon suite, but Ohm ignores the front desk man’s frenzied insistence. Soon enough, Ohm also realizes he’s sharing the room with another nightmare. Fiona is discovered, lifeless, in the dumbwaiter. It turns out Jerry was right, and Mal makes a run for it, locking Ohm in the suite behind him.
With no way for the woodsman to have known all that he did, Ohm begins to suspect there may be something more at play in the suite.
Ohm tries his best to get out of the suite but to no avail. As night falls, the anxiety and terror of being stuck alone in a purported haunted hotel overwhelms the trapped author. The recorder that Ohm was using at the inn was kept by Fiona, and she used it to record her last hours in the basement. She reveals that she is pregnant, and Mal is the father. It’s clear through a flashback that Mal drugs Fiona and stows her in the dumbwaiter, sending her down to her ultimate demise. The dumbwaiter is broken and can only be operated using the button at the top, in the suite.
The apparitions reach a fever pitch and, like any lead character in a horror film, Ohm decides it’s a good idea to take the ancient dumbwaiter down to the basement of the hotel in search of an exit. Then again, what other choice does he have? This, of course, doesn’t go well as- you guessed it- there is a witch stalking the darkness of the basement.
We see more of the hag here and there’s a particular scene in which she stalks Ohm up the dumbwaiter and through the suite that packs a powerful burst of jump scares. The noises that emanate from the witch are chilling, a combination of cackles and shrieks, wails and howls that contribute to the film’s nightmarish sound design.
As Ohm struggles to ward off the supernatural while coming to terms with what happened to his mother, Jerry makes a heroic return to the hotel in search of the trapped guest. Mal has also returned to the hotel and, desperate to keep his nefarious secrets safe, he disposes of Jerry before Ohm can get out of the room safely.
As the film reaches it’s wailing crescendo, Ohm has to hurriedly make his way back down the basement to escape Mal. The witch, of course, is down there, but Ohm figures he can draw a circle around himself for protection until he can figure out a plan to escape. Mal makes his way down to the basement ultimately, shackled to the witch. This is how the old man at the beginning of the film said that the witch’s victims are drawn into the underworld, pulled along by chain until the witch leads them into the bowels of Hell.
Ohm comes to terms with his mother’s passing, insisting “it was an accident” as the ghost of his mother reassures him that she forgives him. She then reminds Ohm that he can’t stay where he currently is. The hotel is burning down above him, thanks to Mal setting a space heater on high and covering it with blankets.
Ohm watches as Mal is dragged into the shadows with a horde of terrifying looking ghouls reaching out for him. Mal’s screams and the demons’ growls disappear as quickly as they begin when the dark entities and Mal go through the mysterious doorway at the end of the basement.
Smoke-choked as he tries to escape the hotel, Ohm collapses near the lobby. Fergal, drawn to the hotel by the massive spreading fire and surely in search of Jerry, enters at just the right time is drawn to Ohm when he hears what sounds like Fiona calling him name from somewhere in the flames.
For the second time in the film, we then find Ohm in a hospital bed, this time finishing his novel with a much more uplifting ending than the one he originally envisioned. He is visited in the hospital by Alby, the bellhop, who bashfully admits to spiking Ohm’s flask with Jerry’s magic mushrooms. So maybe it was all a bad trip, right? Then again, how can Ohm explain the bruising around his wrists from the shackles he was captured in?
Ultimately, the film, like Ohm’s book, ends with what appears to be a hopeful ending. Alby tells Ohm that the firefighters found Fiona and Jerry’s remains in the debris, but not Mal. Ohm asks Alby to get rid of the bottle of champaign Alby brought to the room, seemingly kicking booze, and offers to read Alby’s manuscript.
A witch film in the year 2026 can be a lot of things, but the one thing it absolutely must be is scary. This film hits its mark. Jump scares make up a majority of the heart rate elevation in Hokum, but there is a dread that permeates throughout the film from the very start. The added weight of grief, mixed with a glimmer of hope that perhaps Ohm and Fiona could become something more, turns the screw ever tighter as the film progresses.
The fever dream that ensues after the witch completely reveals itself to Ohm had me groaning quietly in my seat, with the witch’s crawling up the dumbwaiter and peering through a high window scratching at the back of my head several days after seeing it. Mal’s descent into the underworld was an effective and chilling demise that was quite justly deserved.
McCarthy has shown he can flex the folklore and supernatural muscle like almost no other, following the releases of 2020’s Caveat and 2024’s Oddity. This being McCarthy’s Hollywood debut, Hokum rightfully feels bigger and more polished, but not in a typical Hollywood way. The cinematography and landscape used creates a daunting isolation for Ohm, and the shadow-laced hotel provides a perfect setting for the witch story to come. Special effects are largely practical here, and when CGI is used, it’s in quick bursts that fare well. The nightmare scenes are effective and quite timely. It’s a welcome reprieve from the usual over-use of jump scares, as the film uses shadow and atmosphere as a perfect balance to the heart-racing flashes of terror.
Scott goes all-in from the opening sequence in this film, clearly committed to the role and having the time of his life. He navigates the character through growth and tension throughout the film. For as much as you can’t help but kind of despise the arrogant writer when he first walks into the hotel, audiences are white-knuckling their seats as he struggles to complete a chalk circle during his standoff with the witch. It’s a really strong performance that should earn some horror award recognition for the fan favorite veteran.
The supporting roles of Fiona (Florence Ordesh), Alby (Will O’Connell) and Mal (Peter Coonan) keep the cauldron boiling throughout the film. O’Connell also doubles as the man behind the bulging eyes that we all have seen dozens of times in the film’s promotional ads.
But it’s David Wilmot, as Jerry, who wears the crown in this one. We first meet Jerry as a likeable oddball who lives in a van in the woods. He enjoys laced goat’s milk and suffered a tremendous loss when his wife passed away. Shaken by the grief and struggling to find a semblance of normalcy after the tragedy, Jerry does his wife’s memory well and ultimately becomes the hero of the film. It’s been argued quite a bit online that Jerry, not Ohm, is the main protagonist of this film and I can’t find a reasonable debate to counter that thought.
The film premiered at the 2026 South by Southwest Film Festival to rave reviews that have only mostly blossomed into more praise and applause since it’s theatrical release on May 1, 2026.
We’ve seen witch movies before. We’ve seen plenty of well-known actors take on smaller budget horror films to bring a jolt to the genre during almost any given year. But it’s McCarthy’s enthusiasm and genuine love for the art of storytelling that casts the ultimate spell here.
If I were a grade-giving writer, I’d raise four-and-a-half out of five candle-heated spoons to Hokum.
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