Hokum Review: A Terrifying Welcome in the Haunted Isle

Hidden down a leafy Irish backroad, the Bilberry Woods Inn is the kind of oak-paneled and leather-padded manse that was once a destination for the wealthy decades ago. Yet now it is tired, and closes for the winter season. The very name hides a bitter secret: Unlike its sweet colonial cousin, the blueberry, the wild-growing bilberry is shockingly sour. But even it is not as sour as the curdled soul of Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott), a successful American author with a savage tongue and an attraction to Bilberry Woods that he doesn’t quite understand.

Best known for his more comedic work, the presence of Scott in Irish supernatural horror Hokum may seem like miscasting, like he’s always going to stand out. That’s exactly what he’s supposed to do as Bauman – much to the novelist’s constant fury. With only a small suitcase and the final remains of his late parents, he’s there to run up a bar tab in gloomy silence and perform a personal ritual. But everyone here recognizes the great Ohm Bauman, from the infuriatingly diplomatic manager, Mal (Peter Coonan), to the annoying bellhop and aspiring writer Alby (Will O’Connell), to the kind barkeeper, Fiona (Florence Ordesh), who has woes of her own but still wants to know how he’ll conclude his blockbuster Conquistador trilogy. With every intrusion, Bauman seethes and strikes at them, infuriated by the intrusion. Indeed, the only local he can truly tolerate is David Wilmot as Jerry, the village outcast who couldn’t care less about yer man’s supposed fame.

However, theirs are not the only unwanted attentions focused around him: This is Ireland at Halloween, with talk of ghosts, a child-eating witch, cursed trees, a dead bride in a sealed honeymoon suite. “Hokum,” declares Bauman with all the grace of Scrooge calling Jacob Marley indigestion to his translucent face. But then a man with ghosts enough of his own shouldn’t go smashing so blithely through the veil between worlds at this time of year, and in this shadow-drenched place.

From his unnerving but obtuse debut, 2020’s Caveat, through his 2024 festival breakout, Oddity, writer/director Damian McCarthy has refined his bleak, unsettling, and even esoteric style of supernatural folk horror into a more enchanting and chilling form for mainstream audiences. With Hokum, he finds the perfect balance between his brilliant idiosyncrasies and a crowd-pleasing thrill ride, without ever sacrificing his singular re-envisioning of Irish folk horror. The mythology he builds is dense and rich, even cutting away to depictions of Bauman’s sunbleached denouement to his next novel, and yet it all folds in together, like the roots of a tree that grow over each other. His is a world of moss and mold, growth and corruption side by side, with Bauman clutching to his skepticism like a talisman. Scott becomes the perfect foil for McCarthy’s chills, his refusal to accept what is increasingly obvious adding real emotional weight to a lengthy third act that is really little more than Bauman exploring the sealed-up hotel.  

Inveterate prop collector McCarthy, set decorator Ciara McKenna, and production designer Til Frolich handcraft one of the great horror locations in the Bilberry Wood; each cracked cherub and witch’s totem is an integral, eerie component of his mythos. Then, having built this world, McCarthy ends up fixing half the problems of modern horror: Hokum isn’t underlit, but instead his Oddity cinematographer Colm Hogan reminds us of the terror of the darkness outside of the lantern’s reach. McCarthy’s jump scares aren’t unearned tricks, but the anticipated reveal of what was in that shadow that moved wrong. 

But most of all, he knows how to weave a good old yarn of spirits and secrets, one that has more in common with legends like Dennis Wheatley than with the modern reductive trend for trauma porn. As Bauman falls deeper and deeper into the mysteries of Bilberry Inn, McCarthy masterfully reminds us that a ghost can be real and a metaphor, as the scares demand.

Hokum

2026, R, 101 min. Directed by Damian McCarthy. Starring Adam Scott, Will O’Connell, Florence Ordesh, Peter Coonan, David Wilmot.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

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