Hokum (2026)

Damian McCarthy's Hokum concerns an American novelist named Ohm Bauman who travels to a hotel in County Cork to scatter his parents' ashes and finds, in place of closure, a locked honeymoon suite, a local witch called the Cailleach, and a bellhop with literary ambitions of his own. Adam Scott plays the author as a man of sour moods and poor manners. The film is interested in fog, in mushrooms, in the sound of a bell ringing down an empty corridor. It has no interest in instructing us. This is, given the current climate, a small mercy.

The plot turns on Mal, the desk clerk, who drugs his pregnant girlfriend Fiona and seals her inside the haunted suite to spare himself a family conversation. That is a plot development, not a thesis. Nobody in the film pauses to comment on it. The story proceeds as such stories have always proceeded: one secret, one locked door, one axe, one crossbow, one fire. The cast is largely Irish and largely male, assembled without ceremony or announcement. Rural poverty, drink, and a van-dwelling man sipping milk laced with psilocybin are presented as facts of the landscape, not as arguments about anything.

Craft is the whole of it. McCarthy builds dread from dumbwaiters and chalk circles, then resolves it with a chain, a ghost, and a mother's voice in the dark. The film closes on a hopeful revision to a fantasy trilogy about a conquistador, which is the nearest it comes to a message. There is no sermon, no lesson, no moment where a character turns to the camera to explain how we ought to live. There is only a haunted hotel burning down with a murderer still inside it. Some evenings, that is sufficient.