On Hokum (2026)
What do you do after spending the day with horror fans and horror luminaries at StokerCon? Last week I watched Hokum in a dark hotel room with a dear friend after spending all day in rooms full of strangers who write this stuff for a living, which is the worst possible audience and the only honest one. We didn't talk for a minute after the credits, which is the highest compliment I know how to pay a horror film.
Hokum is, on paper, a haunted house picture, and it would like you to believe it is only that for as long as it can manage. A writer named Bauman — famous, sour, the kind of man who refuses to sign a child's book — checks into a crumbling place on the Irish coast where his parents once honeymooned. The owner keeps a witch locked in the closed suite upstairs, or says he does. The staff drink a milk-and-mushroom brew that opens the mind, or hollows it out, depending on who's narrating. A girl who tends the bar, kinder to him than he deserves, goes missing. A bellman keeps pressing his own manuscript on the writer, who will not read it. A man in the woods who once had a sick wife who died under convenient circumstances becomes the thing everyone points at. You can feel the film deciding, scene by scene, how much it's willing to confirm. The answer turns out to be: almost nothing.
First, the praise, which is owed. This is a beautiful film. The hotel is shot like a body going cold — long, blue, depopulated corridors, a dining room lit as if the bulbs themselves were tired, a stairwell that the camera treats as a throat. Somebody on this production understood that dread is mostly architecture, that a closed door at the end of a hall does more work than any creature ever will, and they let the building act. It earns the comparison to the genre's grown-up wing: it is patient, it is composed, it never once reaches for the cheap startle. When the horror does arrive it comes in through the side of the frame, the way a creature's claw comes out of the dark. Writer/director Damian McCarthy's visual vocabulary has grown considerably since 2024's Oddity.
And it is acted with real restraint. Adam Scott carries the whole rotten weight of a man hollowed by grief and turned cruel by it — here to bury his parents, contemptuous of anyone who tries to reach him, daring the world to punish him for a guilt he won't name; he plays Bauman's cruelty as exhaustion rather than menace, which is harder and far more disturbing. The girl at the bar — fan, confidante, casualty — gives the film its only warmth, and the film spends it deliberately. The supporting players who drift through the lobby with their mushroom-light eyes never tip into caricature. Nobody is slumming. Everyone seems to know they're in something with ambitions, and they meet those ambitions.
The trouble is the title, and the title is not an accident. Hokum — nonsense, claptrap, the sentimental trick, the thing a hard-nosed skeptic says to wave the supernatural away. The film builds its whole nervous system around that word. Is the witch real, or is she the chalk circle a frightened man draws to feel safe? Is Bauman haunted, or merely poisoned by a brew somebody slipped into his whiskey out of wounded pride? All these things exist, a character insists; closed-minded people just can't see them. The film wants to sit exactly on that knife — the place where belief and delusion are the same gesture seen from two angles — and for a long, electric stretch, it does. The doubling is good: a believer and a skeptic, a man exiled to the woods for a death he calls a mercy and a man holding court in the lobby who cannot see the guilt on his own hands — a story that keeps asking whether the monster upstairs, the monster in the woods, and the monster signing books in the lobby are the same monster wearing the building's faces.
But there is a difference between an ending withheld and an ending buried, and Hokum never quite trusts itself to know which one it's making. What this film does, in its last movement, is something subtly stingier: it removes the center and hopes you won't notice the shape of the hole. When everything is permitted to mean everything, nothing is finally allowed to cost anything. The closing images are vicious and gorgeous — a refrain about not stopping at blood, not stopping at bone, hitting until the thing breaks — and they land like a thesis, except the film hasn't earned the right to a thesis, because it has spent two hours declining to commit to a single floorboard of fact. Calling it 'brave' and calling it 'a dodge' are both partially right, which is its own kind of problem: a film this assured shouldn't leave the room split on whether it said anything at all.
I keep coming back to the bottle. Early on, Bauman describes one of his own bleak novels — a boy beaten to death with a bottle that refuses to break, the man wandering off into the desert to die, no comfort offered. Why write this? someone asks him. It's meant to challenge you, he says, and she tells him she won't read it, not if that's the end. The film clearly thinks it's the bottle: hard, unbreakable, a challenge you're too soft to finish. I'm not sure. A bottle that won't break isn't difficult. It's just closed. The challenge would have been to let it break and make us watch what spilled out.
So: a beautiful, well-made, intelligently performed film that mistakes its own evasiveness for depth, and very nearly gets away with it on craft alone. And yet I haven't been able to put it down, which complicates every hard word above — a film that only dodges shouldn't follow you out of the room and sit at the foot of the bed. My friend and I went quiet after the credits and stayed that way; the silence was real, and the film earned it, whatever it withheld after. Maybe that's the trick the title was warning me about. Maybe the hokum worked.
Believe what you want. A week later, I'm still deciding whether I do.
Deeper Cuts
Every review here ends in the stacks. These are related works that share a particular wound, for when you end the story and you are not ready to leave the dark yet.
If the mercy got its hooks in
Beloved, Toni Morrison. The mercy that looks like murder from the outside, written by the only hand that ever made it unbearable. Sethe does a terrible, loving thing to spare her daughter a fate she judges worse, and the thing comes back — not as metaphor, as a girl at the door who will not leave. Where Hokum keeps its dead wife offscreen and lets the man in the woods narrate his own absolution — her spirit, he swears, came back to thank him — Morrison drags the cost into the kitchen and sits it down at the table. This is the book the film is too polite to be. Read it for the version where the haunting has a face, a hunger, and a name.
Pet Sematary, Stephen King. The other half of the same wound: not the mercy of an ending but the refusal to let one stand. King's grief does the unforgivable thing to undo a death rather than grant one, and the dead come back wrong. Set it beside the film and you have the two directions love rots in — the man in the woods, who let his sick wife go and was damned for it; Louis, who couldn't let his boy stay gone, and is damned for that. Neither keeps his hands clean. Neither story lets you decide you'd have done better.
If the witch got its hooks in
The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson. The founding text of the knife Hokum stands on: is the house doing this, or is she? Jackson never tells you, and the not-telling is the horror — Eleanor's mind narrowing toward the house the way Bauman's narrows toward the locked suite, every supernatural sign equally readable as a mind coming apart. If you want the chalk-circle trick — belief and delusion as the same gesture from two angles — performed by someone who actually commits to the ambiguity instead of hiding inside it, it is here, and it has never been bettered.
A Head Full of Ghosts, Paul Tremblay. The modern answer to real, or hokum? A family's catastrophe that may be possession or may be untreated illness, narrated by someone who needs it to be one and fears it's the other. Tremblay does on the page what the film attempts on the screen — withholds the resolution on purpose — but he earns it, because the withholding costs his narrator something. Read it to feel the difference between an ambiguity that wounds and an ambiguity that only shrugs.
If the bottle got its hooks in
Misery, Stephen King. Hokum gives you a writer who despises a happy ending and a bellman pressing a manuscript he won't read; Misery is that exact pairing turned into a vise. Annie Wilkes is the reader Bauman spends the film insulting, returned to make him answer for it — to demand the ending go her way and break whatever won't bend until it does. The film flirts with the cruelty of authorship. King locks you in the room with it.
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy. The bottle that won't break, handed a whole desert to wander. Bauman's invented novel — the boy beaten with a bottle, the man walking off into the sand to die, no comfort offered — is reaching for this, and McCarthy is where that bleakness actually lives: violence without catharsis, an ending that refuses every consolation and is somehow scripture anyway. Hokum quotes the register; Blood Meridian is fluent in it. That one McCarthy's desert should haunt another McCarthy's hotel is a coincidence the film would probably enjoy.
