Hokum (2026)

The hotel has a ghost story. Its guest has some objections.

Written and directed by Damian McCarthy · Approximately 107 minutes
Starring: Adam Scott · David Wilmot · Peter Coonan · Florence Ordesh

Source-based first draft. Verdict and advisories are proposed; numerical Corny DNA remains unscored. Explore the 2026 additions.

An unpleasant guest is an excellent thing to put in a haunted hotel. He can dismiss the local account, offend the people who might help him and remain entirely unprepared for what happens when a room stops behaving like accommodation. Hokum makes productive use of that arrangement without requiring its central man to become charming on arrival.

Adam Scott plays Ohm Bauman, a writer visiting an Irish hotel to scatter his parents' ashes. The BBFC release record establishes the premise and Damian McCarthy's direction. The film's most useful tension is between the stories Ohm is prepared to dismiss and the personal history he would prefer not to examine.

Before you watch

Intense supernatural horror, bloody violence, decayed bodies and confinement in dark spaces. The aftermath of a suicide attempt and repeated references to suicide are significant, alongside family bereavement and a traumatic childhood firearm incident. Pregnancy-related abuse is also part of the plot. Drug use and dead animals are present. The classification advice supports the principal warnings; specific abuse and drugging contexts are disclosed separately.

Specific content details (contains spoilers)

A recording reveals that a pregnant woman was drugged and confined by her partner.
A later confession establishes that a drink was spiked without consent.

An abrasive person still has to be interesting

Scott's presence gives the film a useful double edge. Ohm can be acutely uncomfortable and quite capable of making everyone else's evening worse. His cruelty is expressed through small social transactions, which gives the performance more texture than a label announcing that the writer is troubled.

The humour benefits from that discomfort. A rude response can be funny while making the next request for assistance less comfortable. The film lets social consequences accumulate around the supernatural ones. It does not need to pretend that a frightened person has automatically become a better one.

Grief gives that behaviour a context without making every insult an expression of hidden virtue. That distinction is important to the eventual movement towards care. A character has somewhere to go only if the film permits his current conduct to be a problem.

The building is a working part of the story

The hotel is useful because hospitality has procedures. Staff know which door opens where; a guest assumes somebody will respond when called. Those ordinary arrangements can become frightening as access is restricted and help moves beyond reach.

McCarthy's horror works through that practical dependence. An object that should connect two people can instead demonstrate how completely they have become separated. Darkness is more effective when the viewer has a sense of what the room is supposed to do, and why a particular exit or signal matters.

The supernatural imagery then intrudes into a place with a material identity. The film is interested in the inconvenience of terror: reaching another floor, attracting attention or getting through a locked boundary. Those problems give the folklore a physical form rather than leaving it as a story somebody explains at the bar.

Local knowledge is more than colourful exposition

The people around Ohm have competing accounts of the hotel and one another. David Wilmot's Jerry is especially valuable because his apparent unreliability does not prevent him from noticing something important. A person can be eccentric, compromised or socially inconvenient without becoming disposable.

That supplies the film with a humane counterweight to its abrasive protagonist. Assistance has to come through people he has underestimated. The resulting dependence is a stronger source of character pressure than another explanation of why the building might be haunted.

The material also allows humour to coexist with unease. A local anecdote can sound ridiculous until a later situation changes the listener's relationship to it. The film does not have to remove the absurdity to make the danger real within its world.

The redemptive story needs its limits

The main reservation concerns how much the surrounding people are asked to provide for Ohm's development. Florence Ordesh's Fiona matters as a person whose care has consequences, but the later revelations risk making her suffering primarily a resource for the male protagonist's moral and emotional journey.

The human abuse therefore deserves attention alongside the witch imagery. Its seriousness is not reduced because the larger story contains ghosts, nor does the possibility of personal healing settle what another person has lost.

The late combination of mystery explanation, escape mechanics and emotional reckoning can also become busy. The film is more persuasive when an immediate practical need carries the feeling than when a revelation has to clarify several kinds of unfinished business at once. Those qualifications leave substantial room to admire its control of ordinary spaces and its central performance.

Corny DNA

There is deliberate black humour and an appetite for alarming folklore. The film's eccentric people and objects give it personality without making it an exercise in affectionate failure. Its pleasures are largely those of a carefully organised ghost story. The six numerical axes remain for the owner's assessment.

Verdict

Worth watching — proposed. A strong prospect for viewers drawn to haunted spaces, abrasive character comedy and horror built around practical obstacles. Scott and Wilmot give the supernatural machinery human friction. The caveats are substantial suicide-related and trauma material, the handling of Fiona's narrative function and a crowded final reckoning. The recommendation rests on craft and character pressure, rather than simply on the presence of a memorable witch.

Spoilers from here

Reveal the ending and detailed analysis

A rescue leaves an obligation

Ohm discovers Fiona's body and Mal's responsibility for her confinement. Jerry dies trying to help him. Ohm escapes the witch and the burning hotel after confronting his childhood guilt; Alby later admits to spiking his drink. Physical marks leave the supernatural experience unresolved as a purely drug-induced event. These details are corroborated in the scene account.

The ending connects a previous act of care with the possibility of surviving. That gives the escape a relationship to the film's ethical concerns: Ohm's eventual openness depends on people whose help he could not earn merely by being a successful writer.

It should also complicate the satisfaction of his recovery. Fiona and Jerry do not regain their lives because Ohm can imagine a more hopeful conclusion. The improved manuscript is a sign of changed attention, not compensation for their deaths.

Alby's confession preserves some uncertainty about the experience, but uncertainty does not require declaring that nothing happened. The remaining bodily evidence gives the film a way to keep the supernatural and psychological readings in tension. Either way, Ohm has been forced to reconsider the confidence with which he dismissed other people's accounts.

Sources

This owner-requested addition does not establish Seen-list status or approval of the proposed judgment.