Adam Scott is back in the trailer for Hokum, the new folk-horror film from Irish filmmaker Damian McCarthy, as the mystery around a remote Irish inn begins to tighten ahead of its UK release on 1 May 2026. Scott plays an American writer named Ohm Bauman, who retreats to the inn to scatter his parents’ ashes, only to be pulled into something far darker.
The trailer leans hard into the old-storytelling menace that has become McCarthy’s calling card. A voice warns, “Fadó Fadó, long long ago,” before adding, “Deep in the woods, there lived...” and then, “There are worse things that Strangers out there, yank.” Another line pushes the tale further: “Fadó Fadó, long long ago, deep in the woods, there lived... an old cailleach,” followed by the blunt reveal, “A witch.”
That setup matters because Hokum arrives with momentum already built in. The film debuted at the South by Southwest Festival last month, and it now reaches cinemas in the UK after a run that has put McCarthy’s work back in the frame following Oddity. Scott’s character is not just facing local superstition. The official synopsis says the staff’s stories about the supposed haunting of the honeymoon suite begin to take hold of his mind, before disturbing visions and a shocking disappearance drag him into a confrontation with the darkest corners of his past.
McCarthy is no stranger to turning isolation into dread, and Hokum appears to be pushing that instinct into a more personal register. The pressure point is not simply whether the inn is haunted, but how much of what Ohm Bauman sees can be trusted once the story begins folding his grief into the folklore around him. With Severance having wrapped its second season over a year ago and fans still waiting for a third run, Scott’s return here gives him a very different kind of screen turn: one built on unease, not puzzles. The question now is whether Hokum can turn the trailer’s old-world warning into a full-scale nightmare when it opens in UK cinemas on 1 May 2026.
