HOKUM (2026) – A Haunted Hotel Tale That Finds Terror in Grief, Guilt, and the Dark

In Hokum, Irish writer-director Damian McCarthy turns a remote rural hotel into a place where grief checks in, superstition lingers in the corridors, and every shadow seems to be holding its breath. The title itself has a sly, old-world flavour: “hokum” is a seldom-used word for nonsense, theatrical trickery, or something knowingly absurd, which makes it an apt label for a film that toys with disbelief before dragging it into the dark. Adam Scott, best known to many viewers for Severance, stars as Ohm Bauman, an American novelist who travels to Ireland to scatter the ashes of his late parents in the woods near the Bilberry Woods Hotel, the place tied to their honeymoon and, as he soon discovers, to far more troubling histories.

What begins as a morbid act of closure slowly curdles into something stranger. Ohm settles into the hotel and starts noticing the uneasy rhythms of the place: guarded staff, local whispers, and stories of a haunted bridal suite that has become less a room than a warning. The film is clever enough not to reveal all its ghosts at once. Rather than rushing headlong into supernatural spectacle, Hokum lets its mystery twist around what initially appears to be a crime of passion, only for that thread to become entangled with folklore, guilt, and the possibility of an old, watchful evil.

The film’s real strength lies in its patience. McCarthy understands that horror is often most effective when it is not shouting for attention. He uses the surrounding forest, the worn interiors of the hotel, and the oppressive stillness of darkened rooms to create a mood of creeping unease. The result is a slow-burn horror film that relies less on cheap jump scares or excessive gore and more on atmosphere, suggestion, and the disquieting feeling that something terrible has been waiting in the building long before Ohm arrived.

That said, Hokum is not without its frustrations. Its commitment to darkness, while thematically fitting, sometimes works against it. Too many scenes are swallowed by low light, making it difficult to appreciate the production details, the geography of the sets, and even the design of the creature or supernatural presence at the heart of the terror. Darkness can be a powerful tool in horror, but here it occasionally feels less like atmosphere and more like concealment.

Still, the film lands with more assurance than many modern horror offerings. Its ending provides a satisfying sense of closure without surrendering to the fashionable vagueness of an open-ended finale, and that decision gives the story emotional weight as well as genre payoff. Hokum may not reinvent haunted-hotel horror, but it refines it with intelligence, mood, and a welcome respect for dread over noise. For horror fans looking for something spooky, atmospheric, and unusually rooted in personal reckoning, this is a solid and rewarding entry.