Hokum

dir: Damian McCarthy

2026

Ireland’s greatest living director, of horror flicks or otherwise, returns with a new flick starring Adam Scott as a complete arsehole.

Hold the front pages! Two seasons of Severance somehow convinced audiences that Adam Scott was some kind of nice guy. Nuh-Uh! This flick is here to remind us that Adam Scott excels at playing awful cruel jerks. He doesn’t just love it, he lives for this shit.

Here, he’s not only a jerk, but a jerk who’s a successful writer, who can’t figure out how he wants to end his trilogy of Conquistador novels that seem to be unrealistically popular with the masses. He has contrived an ending where the hero, presumably the Conquistador, wonders whether he should just die, or whether he should shatter a bottle that contains a map leading him out of the desert by smashing it on a child’s head, presumably killing the boy.

What the fuck? How dare you start a film like that!

What kind of a writer, what kind of a person would come up with something like that?

Maybe it’d be someone who has no fucks left to give about anything, let alone his career.

As he writes, alone, in his grey concrete monstrosity of an apartment, drinking heavily, we can see that he’s already haunted.

For reasons we don’t yet know he’s decided to travel to Ireland, to stay at a specific hotel, carrying his parent’s ashes. After some pointers as to the location of a particular tree, he lovingly and carefully lays down his mother’s ashes. When he gets rid of his dad’s ashes, it’s like he’s throwing away a container full of shit.

So already we know he loved his mother dearly, and did not care much for his father at all.

Nothing’s ever that simple in family dynamics, is it?

While he’s at the hotel, this jerk with the unlikely name of Ohm Bauman, goes out of his way to lose friends and alienate people, and he seems to always, always, always be drinking whisky, and anything else offered to him. He is beyond rude and abusive to the staff, to the point where he even places a spoon on an open candle flame to heat it up for the express purpose of burning someone’s hand who he’s just insulted, in between sips.

He’s never drunk, but he’s constantly drinking. That’s not good for you, apparently. And even if it seems really obvious, it’s telling us something about the character in a less obvious way. Yes he’s clearly fucked up about something to do with his parents, and yes alcohol never helps with these issues, no matter how many litres of liquor you consume.

And then something pretty shocking happens, which I won’t spoil, which I at first thought happens out of fucking nowhere, but then the more I thought about it, the more sense it makes.

But then something even more shocking happens, resulting in the disappearance of a character at the same time as the initial shock, which at first made me think “you’re just putting a hat on top of multiple hats now”, but the filmmaker earns his laurels throughout this meticulous process.

This is going to sound oh so fucking silly, but what ends up happening is that our main character Ohm is doubly haunted, in that, sure, ghosts maybe exist, but there could be multiple sets of ghosts haunting him for different reasons. Trapped as he becomes in the hotel, in the so-called honeymoon suite that no-one is allowed into, he sets about, um, trying to survive, trying to find out what happened to the one person who he was nice to, why it happened, and more importantly, how to get out of all of this alive in order to make sure the person responsible for something terrible happening gets his or her comeuppance.

Someone who’s watched McCarthy’s previous films, especially Oddity, knows that the chap is in no rush to get to his destination. You get real patient craftsman vibes from how he puts his set pieces, plot structures and physical scene structures together.

For all the strangeness of what’s transpiring, the people in this flick don’t act like they’re in a horror flick, which is to its benefit. I’m not going to enter into a pointless debate over whether it’s actually horror or whether it’s more of a mystery thriller because… that would be pointless, but what it is, is a reasonably clever flick that gets where it’s going to only when the conductor is good and ready.

Everything ends up meaning something or having a later purpose, which is why I mention that there is a bit of a stink of “clever clogs” wafting off of the screen, but it had me smiling more than rolling my eyes. Adam Scott gives a solid performance as someone who can’t quite believe what’s happening to him or what he’s seeing, but he manages also not to lose his marbles just when it would seem most appropriate.

As a deeply cynical protagonist it’s enjoyable watching him come to terms with his diabolical set of circumstances, and try to find solutions to the seemingly intractable problems he’s confronted with. There’s also, I hesitate to say ‘hilariously’, because it probably was only funny to me, an escape room kind of element, which I am a complete sucker for, loving the heck out of the concept.

Do we come around to caring whether Ohm, or some of the other characters, like the slightly daffy Jerry (David Wilmot) live or die? Well, even if Ohm’s an acerbic arsehole at the beginning, most of the middle and still a bit at the end, look, it’s Adam Scott. I’m naturally predisposed to liking anything he’s in, because he has some quality as an actor or a person that I just really like. Had it not been for his perpetually confused looking face in Severance I probably would have given up on that goofy show ages ago.

And here, despite the fact that his character might not initially seem to care whether he lives or dies, I really did want him to survive, and not just for his own sake. I was also quite mindful of the fact that the path McCarthy took in his previous flick, being Oddity, was quite ruthless, and resulted in a plot whereby the survival of characters you’d think would be crucial to the outcome, weren’t that crucial, from the filmmaker’s perspective.

And I could see, even though the stories are not alike, that this flick could resolve in a similarly mercurial way, but he slyly pulls back from that. It all comes down to that opening sequence with the conquistador and the kid in the middle of the desert. When Ohm mentions that he plans on resolving that final part of his trilogy in the bleakest way possible, with one of the staff at the hotel, she, being Fiona (Florence Ordesh), says she’d have no interest in reading such a story or watching it as a film, because it would be too much of a downer. Ohm jokes that it would be okay, because if some streamer like Netflix made it, it would be somehow twisted into a happy ending.

With that point being made, being that happy endings are for snowflakes and weak-minded saps, what seems to change Ohm’s mind is almost dying several times, at the hands of both a highly motivated jerk as well as a host of supernatural entities, and then surviving through his own ingenuity, luck, and someone who otherwise seemed like a villain helping a guy out.

Also, coming to terms with his childhood trauma and guilt. After that, happy endings for everybody!

Does it earn the ending it gets? I would argue it does. I would argue we earn that ending as well for having the patience to sit through this terrifying story. It’s not gory by any stretch, but it is deeply unsettling in parts. Overall I found it strangely satisfying.

8 reasons why Hokum is an ye olde worldy alternative to saying “bullshit” out of 10

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Upon being asked to read someone’s manuscript – “Haven’t I suffered enough?” - Hokum

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi3173698329/