Damian McCarthy made Oddity in 2024 and it was one of the best horror films of that year. Genuinely unsettling, atmospheric, and built around a central image so wrong and so specific that it stayed with you for days. So when Hokum was announced, with McCarthy returning to Irish folk horror and a bigger budget and a recognisable lead, I was paying attention.
The first half did not hold my attention. That is the honest truth of it.
The setup is slow in a way that feels less like deliberate dread and more like the film not quite knowing what to do yet. Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) is an American horror novelist, arrogant and alcoholic and struggling to finish his trilogy, who travels to a remote inn in rural Ireland to scatter his parents' ashes. The inn is said to be haunted by a witch. Disturbing visions begin. A disappearance follows. You know the rhythm. In its first half Hokum follows that rhythm without adding much to it.
Then something shifts.
The Second Half
Around the midpoint the film finds its footing and does not let go. The atmosphere that McCarthy built in Oddity shows up properly here, the negative space and the silence and the creeping certainty that something is just outside your line of sight. There are moments in the second half of Hokum that are genuinely scary. Not jump-scare scary, not loud-noise scary, but the kind of scary that sits at the back of your neck and does not leave. The witch is never fully shown. McCarthy understands that the imagination is more frightening than any CGI creature, and he uses that understanding with real skill.
The twist, when it comes, is good. It earns its place and recontextualises enough of what came before to make the first half feel slightly more purposeful in retrospect.
The twist, when it comes, is good. It earns its place and it recontextualises enough of what came before to make the first half feel slightly more purposeful in retrospect. It is the kind of ending that makes you want to go back and look at certain scenes differently. That is not nothing.
Adam Scott
This is the interesting choice. Adam Scott is not a horror lead. He is the guy from Parks and Recreation, from Party Down, from the warm comedies and the charming supporting roles. Putting him at the centre of a Gothic Irish folk horror film is a strange decision that mostly pays off in unexpected ways. He plays Ohm as a genuinely unpleasant man, narcissistic and dismissive and not particularly interested in being liked. And Scott is very good at unpleasant. He finds the layers underneath the arrogance without ever making Ohm sympathetic too quickly. It is not the performance of the year but it is a more interesting performance than a more conventional horror lead would have given you.
The McCarthy Question
Oddity was better. That needs to be said. Hokum is a slight step down from that film, and there are moments where you can feel McCarthy repeating himself, reaching for the same tricks that worked in Caveat and Oddity rather than finding something genuinely new. The single location, the atmospheric dread, the slow build towards something terrible. It works. It has worked three times now. But it could have been more if McCarthy had pushed himself somewhere less familiar.
The film is beautifully shot. Colm Hogan's cinematography is the best thing about it, all shadows and negative space and rooms that feel like they contain more than they show. The score by Joseph Bishara is effective. The production design sells the inn as a place with genuine history and genuine menace.
The Verdict
Hokum is a film of two halves and the second one is significantly better than the first. The twist works. The scares work, when they arrive. Adam Scott is a more interesting choice than he should be. And Damian McCarthy is clearly one of the most talented horror directors working right now.
But the first half tests your patience, and the feeling that this could have been something truly great never quite goes away. A good horror film from a director capable of great ones.