'Hokum' Review: Adam Scott Trades Wisecracks for Witchcraft in Supernatural Thriller
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
By Shauna Bushe - May 6, 2026
Hokum manages to be both intellectually taxing and viscerally unsettling. In an era often dominated by predictable tropes, this film feels like a living, breathing labyrinth designed to keep the audience in a state of perpetual, fascinated unease.
What is Hokum about?
The story sees Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott), a cynical horror writer, arrive at a remote Irish hotel to scatter his parents' ashes while battling severe grief and writer's block. A lifelong sceptic, Ohm’s nihilism is challenged when Fiona, a local bartender and his only ally, mysteriously vanishes during a festival. Ohm’s search for her leads him to a forbidden honeymoon suite rumoured to house a malevolent entity. Aided by an eccentric local named Jerry, Ohm descends into a surreal, hallucinatory nightmare where the hotel’s dark legends begin to manifest as physical threats. To survive the "hokum" he once mocked, Ohm is forced to confront the buried guilt regarding his mother’s death, ultimately fighting to escape a supernatural realm that mirrors his own fractured psyche.
Adam Scott delivers what is easily the performance of his career here, shedding his usual dry wit for a role that is pure, unadulterated nerves. He plays a man caught in the middle of a conspiracy, and his transformation from a sceptical outsider to a frantic true believer is harrowing to watch. Scott has this incredible ability to convey a total mental breakdown with just the twitch of an eye, making us feel every ounce of his isolation. He’s the perfect anchor for a story that gets progressively weirder by the minute, grounding the high-concept madness in a raw, human desperation that feels uncomfortably real. There is a deep ugliness to his character, that should by all accounts make him loathsome. However, we end up rooting for him not because he is good, but because we come to understand the man beneath the wreckage.
If Oddity (2024) was the film that put Damian McCarthy on the map, Hokum is the one that proves he is currently the most gripping voice in Irish horror. While Oddity spellbound audiences with its "Cabinet of Curiosities" aesthetic and that unforgettable, terrifying wooden golem, Hokum takes those same building blocks; haunted artifacts, isolated Irish architecture, and a vigorous dose of "don’t open that door" and scales them into something far more ambitious. If Oddity was a precision-engineered puzzle of unnatural revenge, Hokum is an atmospheric decent into madness that isn’t afraid to let its protagonist be his own worst enemy.
Hokum is dark, evocative, a brilliantly misleading descent into the architecture of grief. Functioning as an intricate study of sorrow warped by the claustrophobic confines of a mysterious Irish hotel. While the setting is striking, the film’s true soul lies in its rich, deep-rooted folklore; a blackened fairy-tale woven into the opening act that refuses to relinquish its hold on the atmosphere. It operates on the terrifyingly poetic premise that secrets, if buried long enough, eventually take on a predatory physical form. This "rot of the soul" manifests in some of the most genuinely unsettling creature designs in recent cinema; these entities aren't just monsters; they are the externalized scars of the characters’ pasts, creating a visceral, skin-crawling dread. Accompanied by a searing sound design that drives every scare directly into the viewer's marrow, Hokum becomes a profound sensory experience.
In the end, Hokum is haunting, layered, and expertly deceptive, leaving you feeling as if you’ve just woken from a fever dream. It’s a rare achievement, balancing a high-concept folk horror with a deeply personal character study. Proving that the most effective scares aren’t about what is hiding behind closed doors, but rather what’s festering in our own minds. Between the haunting creature designs and Adam Scott’s career-best descent into madness, the film cements itself as an instant classic.
'Hokum' is out now in cinemas.
Want more film reviews? Dive into more reviews, rankings, and film conversations on our site. Explore Film Focus Online now!
