Damian McCarthy’s Hokum sends Adam Scott into the woods with his parents’ ashes and into a hotel where the past has a way of staying put. Scott plays Ohm Bauman, a writer whose popular trilogy about a Spanish warrior has made him famous, but not settled anything inside him.
At the start of the film, Ohm is writing a scene involving a conquistador, a child and a map in a bottle before he travels deep into the Emerald Isle and books a room at the Billbbery Woods Hotel, where his mother and father honeymooned. The elderly owner tells children stories about a witch said to have haunted the grounds, the honeymoon suite is off limits, and Fiona, played by Florence Ordesh, shows him to his room and tends the bar.
Then the story jumps. One month later, Ohm wakes up in a hospital and returns to the Billberry, where the manager tells him Fiona has been missing for several weeks. Police are also looking for a tramp, played by David Wilmot, who lives in the forest nearby. That shift gives Hokum its charge: what begins as a strange retreat becomes a search through grief, local legend and a place that seems to remember too much.
McCarthy, who made Oddity in 2024, has already shown a taste for mysteries that fold in missing people and supernatural unease, and Hokum follows that path without softening it. Two urns labeled Mom and Dad sit on Ohm’s mantle, and a wooden box containing a snubnose revolver holds a particular fascination for him, a detail that makes clear his bestselling books have not cured his existential problems. Rolling Stone has described Hokum as an eerie riff on The Shining, and the comparison fits because the film leans on isolation, dread and a hotel that feels less like shelter than a trap. For Ohm, the return to the Billberry is not a homecoming. It is the moment the place he chose for mourning starts answering back.
The deeper question is not whether the woods are haunted. It is whether Ohm can face what he brought there, and what the hotel took from him while he was gone.