Hokum is a film that feels simultaneously like an apex and a starting point, like the culmination of writer/director Damian McCarthy‘s still-budding oeuvre and his true ushering into the mainstream. Long renowned in horror circles as the auteur behind esteemed indies like Caveat (2020) and Oddity (2024), McCarthy’s Hokum, in many ways, serves as his call-up to the proverbial big leagues, a much-earned opportunity for the Irish filmmaker to flex his muscle with some genuine support behind him. Fronted by Severance star Adam Scott and receiving a wide domestic release from arthouse distributor Neon, McCarthy’s latest film is also inherently his most ambitious, a quality that, depending on the creative, can be both a blessing and a curse.
This is a sentiment that rings true for Hokum, an effort that, while not without its blemishes, is a broadly effective, genuinely unnerving nightmare of a picture that, to this point, stands as McCarthy’s strongest overall feature. Though at times a bit methodical and narratively contrived, the technical prowess and atmospheric command on display throughout are endlessly impressive, with a handful of sequences sticking out as genuinely masterful and as embodiments of the potential inherent to horror as a genre. Much like Oddity before it, Hokum almost immediately establishes a sense of tension and dread that lingers through the rest of the film, with McCarthy often exploiting this sensation to craft genuinely memorable scares that make up for what can be, at times, a rather frustrating narrative; while he doesn’t quite stick the landing, the film otherwise has enough going on to make it a worthwhile outing to the movies, especially if you like waking up at 3:00 A.M. to thoughts of eldritch rabbit-men.
Hokum follows Ohm Bauman (Scott), a successful American author who travels to rural Ireland to spread his parents’ ashes on the grounds of a hotel they once visited. He’s, in academic terms, the worst: he’s standoffish, demeaning, and needlessly combative, immediately meeting almost every employee at the hotel with disrespect and hostility because that’s just the type of guy he is. An air of condescension and pretentiousness permeates around him like a foul odor, a scent likely actualized by the perpetual smell of whiskey on his breath. Hotel bartender Fiona (Florence Ordesh) and bellboy Alby (Will O’Connell) quickly tell Bauman of a supernatural, folkloric rumor associated with the inn, which our well-adjusted writer immediately dismisses as “hokum,” or nonsense; Ohm gives the thought some credence after an employee disappears, prompting him, with the aid of forest-dwelling spiritualist Jerry (David Wilmot), to look into what is actually going on inside the hotel’s restricted area.
It’s throughout the first act that McCarthy begins to establish that sense of tension and anxiety, though he doesn’t do so flawlessly; a rather effective, if not generic, opening sequence leads into Ohm’s travel to Ireland and his subsequent discovery of the hotel’s potential association with the occult. These sequences, while necessary from a narrative and structural standpoint, feel a bit slow, and it immediately becomes grating to follow a protagonist as deliberately unlikeable as Ohm; while this is precisely the intent (and Ohm, at times, is almost comedically rude, which does, to an extent, keep the audience engaged), it just takes a little while for the movie to get going in earnest.
And though not the most captivating first act, McCarthy does communicate the necessary information in terms of plot, character, and lore, and plants enough tonal and atmospheric seeds to make the final two acts genuinely horrific. Hokum really hits its stride in the second act when Bauman, now steeped in the rumor he previously dismissed, becomes trapped in a situation the audience doesn’t know the veracity of; things aren’t making sense, but for Bauman to accept a supernatural explanation is to abandon everything he knows. McCarthy and cinematographer Colm Hogan capture and convey Bauman’s diminishing mental state through the frequent usage of expertly composed wide shots with ample negative space, inherently making the audience veer their eyes into the proverbial abyss to see if something’s there; though Hokum features its fair share of jump scares (a McCarthy staple), its at its most effective and tense when it coalesces its atmosphere with its photography and layered, biting sound design to create moments that conjure a deeper, more visceral reaction than a literal jump.
There are two specific scenes in the second act that best illustrate this idea, one of which uses frequent camera movement, disorienting blocking, advantageous lighting, and brilliant sound design to craft a sequence that can only be described as a nightmare. Without delving into spoilers, the scene sees Ohm being followed by a malevolent presence that, through clever camerawork and blocking, is effectively hidden, playing on the audience’s inherent fear of the unknown—of what could be lurking—as opposed to showing its hand too early. The second sequence features Jack, a character that’s been featured heavily in the marketing and could, visually, perhaps best be described as Louise Belcher if she were raised by the Texas Chainsaw Massacre family. Though not featured often, Jack’s scant scenes are genuinely terrifying, the unsettling makeup and general creature design making him a presence impossible to scrub from your mind. There’s a particular segment in which Jack appears on a television screen that, while less technically proficient than the aforementioned chase scene, is equally as horrific; anecdotally, I woke up at 3:00 a.m. the night after my screening, thought about the sequence, and did not fall back asleep for the rest of the night.
These particular scenes are the highlights of what is a generally masterful second act, one that amplifies and maintains an almost tangible feeling of dread throughout; this particular stretch of the film is not without its warts, as there’s some overly expository dialogue and a few narrative beats that feel too convenient and contrived. These issues persist into the third act and into the film’s climax, both of which feature a few developments that feel out of place and questionable even within the context of the movie’s established rules; these problems, and the film’s unnecessary ‘epilogue,’ or sorts, underscore what is a larger, overarching issue, that being the unearned development of Ohm as a character.
His arc works better on paper than it does in practice. One could write about how he changes throughout the film and see how it logically flows, but what we see in the movie isn’t necessarily congruent with the growth he experiences; it doesn’t feel natural, and his arc is, thus, a bit underwhelming. This leaves the film thematically muddy and nebulous; it’s plainly a representation of repressed grief and trauma while also touching on the inherent longing for parental guidance and companionship, and there’s even a more abstract reading positioning the film as an allegory for the creative process. The events of the film, however, don’t necessarily correlate to Ohm’s arc in a narratively satisfying way, leaving the entire experience a bit muddled; the movie’s framing device, which features Ohm working on a new novel, by extension, feels a tad hollow and unwarranted—it’s not conceptually out of place, just underrealized.
The supporting characters are generally a bit of an issue throughout, as aside from Jerry and Fiona, they feel underdeveloped and one-note. Ohm, however, is an engaging enough protagonist to follow throughout despite the aforementioned qualms, and the film is not entirely devoid of thematic or conceptual merit; Hokum, in a way reminiscent of Jacques Tourneur’s criminally underseen Night of the Demon (1957), balances the ideas of fact vs. fiction, reality vs. perception, myth vs. logic, and paranoia vs. genuine terror. Like Tourneur’s mid-century triumph, McCarthy’s film plays on the inherent fear of accepting the absence of logical reason as a reason itself, of acknowledging the fact that there’s a world—and dangers—we can’t explain using conventional thought; the film’s title, in this regard, makes perfect sense. The movie nearly fumbles at the goalline regarding these ideas, but they’re broadly some of its most well-realized concepts.
Occasional insufficiencies with the script and characterization hold Hokum back from being a truly exceptional picture, but there’s enough throughout that’s genuinely masterful to make it worth a watch. McCarthy’s ability to establish a foreboding atmosphere teeming with tension—and maintain it throughout the majority of the runtime—is endlessly commendable, with several sequences genuinely feeling as though they had been ripped from one’s nightmares and projected onto a screen. The folded-in elements of Irish folklore help to differentiate it enough from other haunted setting movies, with these components coalescing with the cinematography, sound mixing, and thoroughly unnerving creature design to craft a final product that, while familiar, still feels singular and unique. It’s far from the most thematically rich or narratively nuanced horror film ever conceived, but in its strongest moments, it’s a dread-steeped atmospheric masterstroke that delivers in the way of visceral scares. Speaking from experience, an afternoon screening may be advised.
