Damian McCarthy is a fascinating hybrid filmmaker: On the one hand, he might be the closest thing modern horror has to a Wes Anderson analogue, a writer-director who delights in handmade, conceptually dazzling labyrinths dominated by a singular vision; on the other, he values instinct and tone, breaking the perfection of his images in just the right places like planned cracks in Japanese pottery. This makes him a tricky filmmaker to pin down even as his style is immediately recognizable. He can be funny, profound, and utterly terrifying not just in the same film, but often in the same frame. Hokum is the latest fruit of McCarthy’s chameleonic gifts, and his best film yet.
Hokum begins in territory so familiar that it borders on stale, at least on paper. Adam Scott plays a grumpy writer with the wonderfully evocative name of Ohm Bauman, frustrated by his latest work-in-progress and disillusioned with his past successes. Hoping for a change of scenery, or at least a distraction, he decides to finally spread his parents’ ashes together at the site of their long-ago honeymoon, at an idyllic country hotel in Ireland.
Ohm shows up at the place on the eve of Halloween, and his prickly demeanor wins him few friends. He’s rude to the bellboy (Will O’Connell), dismissive of the owner (Brendan Conroy) and his stories about a witch who haunts the property, and even requests a room as far away from the lobby as possible so he can avoid the All Hallows festivities. He does share a certain misanthropic bond with bartender Fiona (Florence Ordesh), though, so when she goes missing, Ohm feels called to figure out what happened, even if the hotel’s concierge (Peter Coonan) and the local unhoused oddball (David Wilmot) insist that he has no real idea what he’s getting into.
Like Stanley Kubrick and the Coen brothers before him, McCarthy is playing in the familiar sandbox of a writer who retreats to a strange hotel and finds himself haunted by its bizarre energies. And like Alfred Hitchcock, he makes said hotel into a puzzle box not just full of horrors, but of disparate personalities. From the moment Ohm enters the parking lot, this place feels not just haunted, but lived-in, from the caretaker trying to protect the cars from local wildlife to the strange carvings of witches and frightened children set out in a lobby diorama. As he did with Caveat and Oddity, McCarthy quickly packs every frame of Hokum with meaning, then invites his audience to guess which of these images will be the most important.
McCarthy’s table-setting then gives way to another of his favorite storytelling devices: The one-person, single-location mystery. Much of the film is given over to Scott as Ohm explores the forbidden corners of the hotel in a search for answers, haunted as much by his own past as the specters of the present. It feels like something of a comfort zone for McCarthy, though Scott immediately shatters any sense of familiarity by making this narrative paradigm his own. He’s played jerks before and his time with Severance has revealed a deeply capable dramatic ability, but his tragicomic work here is the perfect blend of smarmy, wounded, and witty.
To highlight each of these facets of his central character, McCarthy fills Hokum with a funhouse of scares, ranging from ghosts lingering in the background to one very terrifying rabbit man who lives in a television. Those familiar with his filmography will recognize it as vintage McCarthy, but the director amps up his particular tastes for impishly clever jump scares and dreadful atmosphere for his biggest and most widely released film yet. This clearly positions the film as an introduction to his style, while staying true to what got him this far in the first place.
It’s through these idiosyncratic details, his lead actor, and his ability to meld creeping atmosphere and jack-in-the-box terror, that Damian McCarthy’s voice comes through in Hokum. Like his previous films, it still feels intimate and disquieting, yet now expands to the point that it strains its 107-minute runtime; the film’s greatest sin might be that there’s not more space to explore its many dark corners. The maker of indie horror chamber pieces has broadened out into epic carnival rides packed with invention and emotion, without losing his personal touch.
Director: Damian McCarthy
Writer: Damian McCarthy
Starring: Adam Scott, Peter Coonan, David Wilmot, Florence Ordesh, Michael Patric, Will O’Connell, Brendan Conroy, Austin Amelio
Release Date: May 1, 2026
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