A churlish novelist named Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) arrives at a quaint, quite old hotel in rural Ireland, a place where his parents had their honeymoon. While he could be there for a number of reasons, he’s primarily in this isolated place to scatter their ashes, which he does with about as much enthusiasm and emotion as tossing away garbage. After which, he heads to the hotel bar, flirts with the bartender Fiona (Florence Ordesh) and get plastered in the process. During their conversations this night, he finds out that the hotel’s honeymoon suite is abandoned, shutdown, and completely inaccessible. When he inquires why, the hotel manager, Mal (Peter Coonan), casually jokes that it’s because there’s a witch locked inside, which immediately motivates Ohm to get in there. But when he returns to his room, he tries to hang himself, only to have Fiona save him before he dies.
After a brief stint in the local hospital, Ohm returns to the hotel to collect his things and say goodbye and thanks to Fiona, only to discover that she has gone missing. A local guy living in the woods nearby (David Wilmot) is the primary suspect because he was the last person seen talking to Fiona, but he denies he harmed her in a anyway, because they were friends, and she used to bring him food from time to time. Ohm isn’t buying it either, and quickly finds a way to get to the shuddered room before the staff can stoop him.
Similarities between Hokum and the Stephen King adaptation 1408 are strictly coincidental, and before too long, Ohm finds himself trapped in the suite and clearly he’s not alone. I don’t think I should say much more at this point, except to confirm that Ohm does discover the truth about multiple things, including Fiona’s fate and what exactly is trapped in this suite with him. There’s a dumb waiter that leads to the basement, which is said to be closed off, so no way out there. There is something almost darkly fairy tale-ish about Hokum, and that makes it all the more terrifying.
Writer/director Damian McCarthy (Oddity, Caveat) is on a roll. He doesn’t resort to cheap jump scares involving characters you don’t care about. He’s delivered complicated characters whose fate we actually care about, even if we don’t particularly like them. He’s also a master of creating dense, claustrophobic atmospheres; hiding things in the dark that slowly emerge to horrifying effect; and writing characters who are odd but never cliche. And without Scott being such a perfectly dick-ish character, none of this works; thankfully, it all does, and Hokum is one of the first great horror experiences of 2026.
The film is now playing in theaters.
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