Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Jason Adams | Film | May 2, 2026
The word “hokum” has become synonymous with “nonsense” but it’s really more than that—hokum is nonsense wielded for a purpose. A magician uses “a bunch of hokum” as a sleight of hand, a poof of smoke to avert our eyes from where their palm’s sneaking for a jolt. In this way Hokum turns out to be the optimal title for a Damian McCarthy film—the director of the excellent Caveat and Oddity has proven time and again to be a master attention manipulator, and Hokum is a creeptastic master-class in misdirects that sever us off at the spine before we can run. He makes us his rubbery playthings and I live for it! Ultimately this is indeed McCarthy’s best film yet—the man keeps getting better and we should each be positively a’quiver that we’re here to witness the rise of such a skilled hokum-man.
Chockablock with plots and hauntings (as were both of his previous movies), Hokum proves McCarthy understands perfectly how every one of us is dragging around our set of own ghosts, and that the rattling of these communal chains is the background noise of life itself. Ohm Bowman (Adam Scott) is no different. A famous author who’s found himself sinking into the sand of the last page of his celebrated Conquistador trilogy (a scene which bookends the film, to very different effect each time), Ohm’s haunted by the ghost of his dearly departed mother. Quite literally as one hell of an early-on jump-scare will tell you, but also literally as in “her ashes are right over there on the shelf waiting for their final resting spot.”
Looking through her things Ohm finds a photo of his mom young and beautiful, smiling brightly, while standing beside an enormous tree—turns out the photo was taken while on her honeymoon decades earlier at a hotel buried deep in the mossy wilds of wee ol’ Ireland. The Land of Ire! And before you can down a pint of Guinness, Ohm’s off to scatter Mom’s ashes (along with the somewhat less doted upon ashes of his father) around the base of said same ancient Irish tree. Perhaps, with it, will come some clarity. And perhaps with that her ghost will also shake rattle and roll itself the heck off this mortal coil. Having your dead mom up on ya at all times of day and night turns out to be a real downer.
That’s the simple enough set-up. It’s one we’ve seen a thousand times before. The ghost is grief, the ghost is trauma. But The Bilberry Woods Hotel and its goat-thronged environs refuse such simplicities—this is a place teeming with characters, superstitions, ringing bells, creepy child figurines, locked up Honeymoon Suites, hot tubs full of black filth, hoboes in the woods chugging magic mushroom smoothies—as with the haunted antiques shoppe in Oddity, this decrepit hotel opens up a world of stories for the relentlessly imaginative McCarthy, and he’s happy to kick down every door for us. Even, or especially, when it’s the last place we wanna snoop.
The movie we think Hokum is going to be plows passed itself pretty fast. Ohm gets to the hotel, he’s a dick to pretty much every person he meets, he scatters the ashes, and voila—it’s time to go. Unfortunately for everybody there’s the annual Halloween party happening—oh did I forget to mention it’s Halloween? Of course it’s Halloween. And from there, well, she all unravels.
The cast of characters surrounding Ohm could’ve stumbled out of a Benoit Blanc mystery or a Jessica Fletcher special—meaning the cast of “characters” will shake out to the list of “suspects” and “victims” soon enough. There’s the Hotel’s creepy wheelchair-bound owner Mr. Cob (Brendan Conroy), who spends his spare time scaring the bejesus out of hotel guest children with tales of a horrible witch who drags people off to Hell. Is this the same witch that the sly bartender Fiona (Florence Ordesh) has heard is locked away in a hidden room upstairs? Who’s to know? (Oh the movie knows.)
The no-nonsense hotel manager Mal (Peter Coonan); the bellhop slash wannabe-writer and Ohm-fanboy Alby (Will O’Connell); the groundskeeper Fergal (Michael Patric)—who seems mainly responsible for murdering wayward goats with a crossbow; and the aforementioned hobo in the woods with his hallucinogenic milk-drink Jerry (David Wilmot) round out the rest of the crowd. And each and every one of these people seem to have their own snags dragging them down hell-ward; their own ghosts snuggled up behind them. And McCarthy makes it his mission to knot us up tight in the tangled crush of their bullshit, all so we can’t see the monster staring us straight in the face.
Not until it’s too late, anyway! I think it’s prudent to note that Ohm—such a strange name everyone (including Ohm) says—could be named after the sound people make when they meditate OR he could be named for the unit for measuring the literal resistance to going with the (electrical) flow. (Or it could’ve just been one of his mom’s nonsense affectations.) Torn between a writer’s curiosity for a good story, several nagging senses of obligation to women he done did wrong, and an ice-cold nihilistic streak that will singe anybody who gets too close, Adam Scott sees Ohm for all his contradictions—you’re telling me this asshole is our hero? There’s a moment early on where you can feel the audience, who’d previously been chuckling along with his caustic asides, turn on Ohm like a startled deer in headlights. And yet Scott, who is very good at what he does, and this is just what eh does, charts us a path through.
Broken people are why we tell ghost stories, after all—such things should be awash in wells of sadness and regret, and McCarthy’s turned out to be one of the finest purveyors of this since Ti West delivered the extremely underrated The Innkeepers fifteen years back. The slow off-kilter creep of the walls between the here and now disassociating; a single hand plunged into darkness where soon, soon, very soon, a set of eyes will be staring back. The jump scares, sharp as knives, give way to their unsettled aftermath—the waves of light and air now vibrating so broad that unspeakable things can slip through, between dimensions, to caress you on the cheek.
Hokum is a ghost story, a haunted house tale, all bewitched and bothered, with most horrible things skittering up walls and several uses for crossbows unlocked—it’s a sad tale of a single mistake shaping our entire story arc, and it’s a frantic nightmare of kiddie-show hosts with bug-eyes blaspheming our most cherished, closest things. What Hokum is is horror movie magic, another gem from a filmmaker who’s now passed halfway to an Infinity Glove full of ‘em. You’ll jump, you’ll scream, perhaps you’ll cry some or maybe even skitter up the walls yourself—there’s no telling what’ll go down when you’re gripped this tight in the confident hold of a movie-maker this skilled. Save a good freaking time at the movie-theater.
