When I saw the trailer for 2026’s Hokum, I assumed I was going to see it and, hopefully, in the theatre. Something just felt right about what I had seen in brief glimpses, things that made me suspect this was more Film4 than A24.
I was glad I took the leap, because this is rare supernatural horror movie that ticked every box on my bingo card. Haunted inn? Check. Chalk circles to ward off evil spirits? Check? Anti-hero whose encounter with a spirit forces them to confront something from their own past? Check.
Adam Scott stars as a famous writer we first see writing the epilogue to the final installment of a hugely popular series. Although the chief protagonist of that appears to be a conquistador, I couldn’t help but think of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. From what we see in a dramatization of what Scott is actively writing, the hero and a young male assistant come to a circle of red sand in an otherwise yellow desert. It appears this is the moment the hero is supposed to free something from a bottle which must be smashed. Unable to find a rock, he prepares to bash in the skull of his ward in order to break that bottle. As Scott will later explain to bartender Florence Ordesh, the boy dies and the bottle remains intact. She rightly calls him out for this being a lousy ending, and he says a happy ending will doubtlessly be appended to the inevitable film adaptation.
This conversation is at the bar of the Bilberry Woods Hotel, deep in rural Ireland. Scott’s parents honeymooned there, and he has come to scatter their ashes at the base of a famous, giant redwood. Much is revealed by him carefully setting his mother’s ashes in a cavity at the base of the tree while simply dumping out into the open air those of his father.
While checking in to the hotel, Scott overhears old and cranky owner Brendan Conroy scaring some young visitors with the story of a witch of local legend. We see porcelain figures of terrified figures of children bound in chains by her as they are being dragged away. Another local legend is the inn’s honeymoon suite, sealed up for decades. There is even an elevator dedicated to just that room on the top floor, which would seem creepy even if the room wasn’t supposed to be haunted.
As I did not read any reviews prior to seeing this film, it is difficult to say what would be a spoiler or not. I will play it safe and try to talk around something very significant and quite unexpected which takes us from the first to the second act. Related to this is the sudden disappearance of Ordesh, and I wish we could have had more of her character in the runtime.
Not that there is a shortage of characters, all of whom leave an impression large enough that, collectively, it feels like the cast is far larger than it is. David Wilmot is the local oddball who lives out of his van and chugs goat milk laced with psychedelic mushroom powder. He is also rumored to have killed his wife. Peter Coonan is the put-upon manager of the inn and the son of Conroy. Michael Patric is a man who provides various and mysterious services for the establishment, which include slaying the male goats which keep banging up cars in the parking lot.
But this is almost entirely Scott’s show, with him wisely by himself in select scenes of significant length. That he is deeply cynical and unlikable for most of the runtime makes the potential he will be transformed by this experience with the supernatural all the more interesting. One incident which makes it extremely hard to root for him is the conversation he has with bellboy and aspiring writer Will O’Connell. Scott heats a spoon on a candle flame and burns O’Connell’s hand with it, saying the man needs thicker skin to be a writer.
This was after humiliating O’Connell by saying into a portable voice recorder he just had an idea for a new character, an “obvious charisma vacuum, completely incapable of reading a room”. The recorder made me think of the 70’s supernatural TV show Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Other elements inevitably had me thinking of The Shining, such as the bathtub in the long-disused honeymoon suite being full of brackish water. Lights turning off in a tunnel made me think of Session 9. It has two creepy rabbit costumes, and one of those gives the one from Donnie Darko a run for its money. The extended sequence of Scott spending a night trapped in that honeymoon suite recalled 1408, though I didn’t care much for that particular film. A disturbing children’s television show is pretty much de rigueur for such fare, as is the service bell ringing for a room that cannot possibly have an occupant.
I am worried about overselling Hokum, when its power is largely in not reinventing the wheel. Fortunately, even though it hits many of the expected story beats, it still has several surprises. And there is a strange comfort in the familiarity of ghost stories, which may be why there used to be a British tradition of reading them on Christmas night. This may sound like a strange reaction to a horror film, but I smiled so much throughout the runtime that my face actually hurt a bit by the end. Hokum delivered exactly what I wanted and expected, and even a bit more.
Dir: Damian McCarthy
Starring Adam Scott, Peter Coonan, David Wilmot, Florence Ordesh
Watched in a theatre