Hokum understands one of horror cinema’s oldest truths. The scariest places are not always abandoned. Sometimes they are open for business. They are staffed by people who know too much, decorated with local stories that sound rehearsed, and quiet in a way that feels less like peace than warning. Damian McCarthy’s new Irish horror film takes that idea and places it inside a remote Irish hotel where grief, folklore and suspicion start to press in on a visiting American writer until the building itself seems to be listening.
Adam Scott plays Ohm Bauman, a reclusive horror writer who travels to Ireland to scatter his parents’ ashes. He arrives at an isolated inn with the emotional stiffness of a man who wants ritual without intimacy. He does not want to belong. He does not want to be charmed. He certainly does not want to believe in local stories about a witch haunting the property. But horror has little patience for sceptics, and Hokum has fun tightening the space around him.
The film is written and directed by Damian McCarthy, the Irish filmmaker behind Caveat and Oddity. It is listed by the Irish Film Institute as a 2026 Irish release, running 101 minutes, with Scott playing a writer drawn into disturbing local lore after arriving at a remote Irish hotel. The IFI synopsis describes strange visions, a mysterious disappearance and the blurring of grief with paranoia, which is a neat summary of the film’s strongest territory.
McCarthy is very good at making spaces feel morally unsafe. In Hokum, the hotel is not just a location. It is the trap, the witness and at times the accused. Its corridors, rooms and sealed-off corners are used with care. Doors matter. Sounds matter. The question of what lies beyond a wall or behind a locked room becomes more frightening than anything the film could show too early.
The premise could easily have collapsed into familiar tourist horror. An outsider comes to rural Ireland, hears spooky folklore, ignores the warnings and gets punished. Hokum is more interesting than that. It uses the outsider’s arrogance and grief to create friction. Ohm’s disbelief is not rational bravery. It feels closer to emotional avoidance. He treats the hotel, the staff and the local stories as material. Slowly, the film turns the gaze back on him.
Scott is well cast because he does not overplay the part. His Ohm is brittle, defensive and often unpleasant, but not empty. He gives the film a dry, uneasy centre. There is a clear sourness to the character that makes the early scenes more uncomfortable than sympathetic. That is useful. Horror often asks us to care about people we barely know. Hokum makes us sit with someone who may not deserve immediate warmth, then lets fear and guilt expose what he has been covering.
The Irish cast gives the film texture. Peter Coonan and David Wilmot bring the kind of presence that changes the temperature of a scene. Wilmot in particular is the sort of actor who can make eccentricity feel human rather than decorative. The supporting characters are not simply there to explain folklore to the foreigner. They make the hotel feel socially occupied even when it feels physically empty.
The film’s strongest quality is its atmosphere. McCarthy does not treat Irish folklore as a pretty accessory. He treats it as something older, stranger and less manageable. The witch story is effective because it is presented as both local performance and possible truth. People tell stories in hotels all the time. They embellish for guests. They build atmosphere. But in Hokum, the performance never fully separates from threat.
The film was shot in West Cork, with RTÉ reporting that it was filmed at West Cork Film Studios. It also stars Peter Coonan and David Wilmot. Light House Cinema lists it as the latest horror film from Irish director Damian McCarthy, with a 15A certificate and a 107-minute runtime.
The film does not present rural Ireland as cosy or quaint. It allows the landscape and the hotel to feel slightly detached from normal time. There is weather in the film’s bones and a sense that the place has absorbed old events without ever resolving them. The result is not postcard Ireland. It is Ireland as a haunted threshold.
Where Hokum works best is in its command of dread. McCarthy knows that a horror film does not need constant motion to keep an audience tense. A pause before a door opens can do more than a burst of noise. A room shown twice from a slightly different angle can become suspicious. A face glimpsed too briefly can stay longer in the mind than a full reveal.
There are jump scares, but the better scares are architectural. The hotel keeps rearranging itself emotionally. What seemed like a lobby becomes a holding space. What seemed like a bedroom becomes a cell. What seemed like folklore becomes evidence. This is where McCarthy’s instincts are sharpest. He understands that horror is often about control, who has it, who loses it, and what happens when the building appears to have more control than anyone inside it.
The film is not flawless. Its grief material sometimes feels more direct than it needs to be. Horror often works best when trauma is not fully explained, and there are moments where Hokum seems tempted to underline Ohm’s inner wounds too firmly. The mystery elements also move through some familiar turns including a missing person, local suspicion, buried history and outsider disbelief. Viewers who watch a lot of folk horror may recognise parts of the route.
But the film has enough personality to survive those familiarities. Its title suggests trickery, nonsense or theatrical deception, and the film plays with that. It asks whether folklore is superstition, entertainment, warning or confession. It asks whether a ghost story can become true because people need it to be true. It also asks whether grief itself can turn a place into a haunting.
The horror is helped by the film’s refusal to make everything clean. This is not a sleek, polished haunted-house machine. It has mud, damp, odd humour and a slight grotesqueness. That roughness gives it character. The hotel does not feel designed by a production team to be spooky. It feels like a place that has been badly maintained by people who have learned to live beside its rot.
Scott’s performance becomes more effective as the film goes on. At first, Ohm risks being too cold a figure to hold the centre. But as the hotel presses on him, that coldness begins to crack. The film does not ask us to admire him. It asks us to watch him become less certain of the story he has told himself about his own life. That is a more interesting kind of horror protagonist than a purely innocent victim.
The use of an American visitor in an Irish setting also gives the film a useful tension. Ohm arrives as someone who thinks he knows the grammar of horror because he writes it. That professional distance is gradually stripped away. The man who understands stories becomes trapped inside one he cannot control. It is a neat reversal and one of the film’s more satisfying ideas.
For Irish audiences, Hokum has extra interest because it is part of a strong run of Irish horror cinema. McCarthy has already built an international reputation with Caveat and Oddity, and this film continues his interest in confined spaces, damaged minds and rooms that seem to carry threat. It is not just an imported horror film set in Ireland. It is an Irish horror film using Irish place, Irish talent and Irish unease.
The film may divide viewers depending on what they want from horror. Those looking for relentless shocks may find parts of it too slow. Those looking for pure psychological ambiguity may feel it eventually explains too much. But viewers who enjoy atmosphere, folk horror and haunted-building stories should find plenty to admire.
What lingers most is not a single image but a feeling. It is the sense of entering a place where hospitality is only a surface, where every local story has a hook in it, and where grief makes a person easier prey. Hokum is at its best when it lets that feeling thicken, when it trusts the hotel’s silences and the audience’s imagination.
Verdict
Hokum is an eerie, well-controlled Irish folk horror film with a strong sense of place, a sharp central performance from Adam Scott and a hotel setting that does much of the haunting. It leans on some familiar genre patterns, but Damian McCarthy’s atmosphere, timing and command of unease make it a strong Irish cinema pick.
Rating 3.75 / 5
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