Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | Film | August 11, 2026
I finally got around to watching Damian McCarthy’s Hokum over the weekend, and listen: forget Backrooms and Obsession. This is the best horror movie of 2026, or at least it’s my absolute favorite. (It also quietly pulled in $24 million at the box office against a $5 million budget, not to mention the absolute mint it must be making on digital given what I assume is aggressively enthusiastic word of mouth.)
It’s haunting, it’s genuinely terrifying in places, it boasts a killer central mystery, an incredible asshole turn by Adam Scott, and a fantastic third-act twist that completely reframes the entire movie. Jason reviewed it back in May, and his review is largely what put it on my radar. So if you haven’t seen it yet and want to avoid spoilers, go read his review and watch the movie immediately.
Because we need to talk about spoilers, folks, and gee willickers, did I have a good time with this thing.
Adam Scott plays Ohm Bauman, a famous-ish novelist who travels to a remote hotel in rural Ireland under the guise of spreading his parents’ ashes (and, presumably, getting some writing done). A lineup of quirky Irish locals staffs the hotel, while Ohm himself is such an unbearable prick that the audience feels precisely zero sympathy when Fiona — a bartender/employee at The Bilberry Woods Hotel — finds him dangling from the ceiling, having attempted to end his own life.
Earlier that day, Ohm had scattered his parents’ ashes out in the surrounding woods — his parents’ honeymoon spot—before parking himself at the hotel bar. There, he casually confessed that a “monster” had shot his mother in the face, and that his father curdled into a bitter jerk for ten years before dying himself. Fiona, meanwhile, filled Ohm in on the hotel’s legend: the haunted honeymoon suite, which is strictly off-limits. The bellhop, Alby, chimed in to confirm that a witch haunts the suite, a witch Alby claims he saw with his own eyes. Alby also mentioned he was a huge fan of Ohm’s books, to which Ohm responded with some of the meanest, most unwarranted venom imaginable.
Then Ohm went upstairs and hanged himself with a belt. Fiona, just trying to return Ohm’s forgotten tape recorder, walked in and cut him down.
He survives, waking up in a hospital two weeks later. When he returns to The Bilberry Woods Hotel to gather his belongings and thank Fiona for saving his life, she’s gone. In fact, she’s been missing for two weeks. Ohm wants to stick around and dig into her disappearance, but the hotel is closing for the season that very day.
On his way out, Ohm encounters Jerry in the woods — a local living out of his van. Jerry is a prime suspect in Fiona’s disappearance, having previously killed his terminally ill wife a decade ago in a mercy killing. Jerry is also heavily into mushrooms, and he believes Fiona is trapped in the honeymoon suite because her ghost appeared to him and heavily implied as much. (Jerry was tripping at the time, naturally, though he insists the psilocybin simply pries his mind open to realities others can’t perceive.)
Once the hotel clears out, Jerry and Ohm break back in using a stolen key Jerry snagged. The groundskeeper catches Jerry, knocks him out, and hauls him off to the police, leaving Ohm to navigate the hotel alone.
Ohm eventually makes his way into the forbidden honeymoon suite, where Mal, the desk clerk (and son-in-law of the hotel owner), ultimately corners him. While in the room, Ohm notices a dumbwaiter, presses the call button, and when the doors slide open, Fiona’s corpse is inside. Mal panics, bolts, and locks Ohm inside the suite.
This is where McCarthy turns the screws. Ohm is trapped in the room with Fiona’s decaying body, haunted by the ghostly apparition of his dead mother, and yes, confronted by the witch — who is utterly terrifying. He also finds his tape recorder, which Fiona had on her when she was drugged and stuffed into the dumbwaiter to die.
Turns out based on the tape recording that Mal was having an affair with Fiona, she got pregnant, and rather than face his wife or his father-in-law, Mal opted for horrific passive murder by locking her away to suffocate.
And about Ohm’s dead mother? Her ghost haunts him because Ohm is the “monster” who shot her in the face. It was an accident when he was a kid, playing with his father’s gun (kids: do not play with guns!), but the crushing guilt has devoured him ever since. Her spirit in the room is a physical manifestation of that lifelong trauma.
After a terrifying gauntlet with the witch, Mal returns to the suite, as does a recovered Jerry. Mal brutally kills Jerry, but not before Ohm manages to swipe the key to the suite. Mal sets the hotel ablaze, but Ohm turns the tables—locking Mal inside the suite with the witch and her demons. Mal is consumed by the supernatural assault (and the fire), while Ohm narrowly escapes the flames and wakes up back in the hospital.
In the hospital, he gets a visit from Alby, the bellhop. Ohm is noticeably kinder to him this time. But then comes the kicker: Alby mentions that, back on the night of the suicide attempt, he spiked Ohm’s flask with Jerry’s mushroom powder — the very same flask Ohm swigged from throughout his nightmare ordeal in the honeymoon suite.
In short:
The dead mom was a manifestation of his lifelong guilt.
The witch was a manifestation of the psilocybin.
There was no literal supernatural witch, just a volatile cocktail of grief, severe trauma, and heavy-duty mushroom powder. Mal killed Jerry and then perished in the inferno he started, while Ohm endured the worst trip in human history.
Crucially, though, Damian McCarthy’s reveal doesn’t feel like a cheap cop-out. As Jerry noted earlier, the mushrooms simply unlocked horrors that were already real to Ohm. The witch was real in every way that mattered to Ohm’s psyche: guilt and grief will absolutely destroy you if you let them. And in the end, Ohm still manages to be an accidental hero, uncovering Fiona’s body and ensuring her murderer didn’t walk free.
The end. Perfect horror movie. No notes.
