A troubled writer battling past demons, a secluded ‘haunted’ hotel and a cast of eccentric and uneasy characters might sound like a familiar set-up for a horror film, and for good reason.

For Cork-born writer/director Damian McCarthy however, it’s a doorway into his own brand of playful and frightening mayhem, inflected with the stories and landscapes of Ireland’s rich mythology.

Hokum follows an American novelist Ohm Baumann searching for emotional and narrative closure at a rural Irish guesthouse, only to discover all is not what it seems at the Bilberry Woods Hotel.

Adam Scott steps into the well-worn boots of the cantankerous writer, tortured both by his own psyche and the seemingly friendly locals steeped in mystery and superstition.

The Severance star lends himself well to the horror space, bringing a deadpan grumpiness that plays well off the local hospitality (we get some instances of Scott being coaxed into having the ‘craic’).

As the title implies, Baumann is a sceptic of all the supernatural ‘nonsense’ the locals warn him about, and there’s plenty of humour in seeing his stubborn mockery turn into abject terror.

He’s joined by some more familiar faces including Peter Coonan (Love/Hate), David Wilmot (Calvary) and Michael Patric (An Cailín Ciúin), lending the supporting cast a level of authenticity in an ensemble that could easily have felt a bit too ‘Hollywood’. Wilmot’s Jerry is a standout as the psilocybin-loving hermit introducing the audience to the area’s dark past, and Florence Ordesh’s Fiona grounds the cast as one of the only seemingly ‘normal’ people impacted by the supernatural goings-on.

The film balances its scares and levity carefully; it avoids veering into outright comedy-horror territory but never loses sight of the inherent humour to Scott’s grumpy fish-out-of-water. Ohm’s casual cruelty and sardonic jabs toward the rest of the cast do well to undermine the sympathy we might be predisposed to have toward a horror protagonist, lending a sense of guilty satisfaction to his inevitable torment while challenging us to connect with a more difficult character.

There are a handful of jump scares throughout the runtime, but the film never feels overly reliant on cheap shocks- with the help of editor Brian David Phillips and cinematographer Colm Hogan, McCarthy makes clever use of the visual language and editing rhythms horror audiences have come to expect. The film is patient and careful with its reveals, using silhouettes and negative space to great effect. Like most great horror we don’t spend much intimate time with the hotel’s apparitions, making effective use of their limited screentime with some wonderfully unsettling imagery.

Hokum showing at the Prince Charles Cinema, London.

The film’s sound design is excellent, the hotel’s halls filled with sinister laughter, clinking chains and even what sounded like some Irish-language incantations. One of the film’s weaker points is its score, which at best fades into the background and at worst detracts from the careful atmosphere that’s cultivated on-screen with more generic horror film strings and shrieks.

Hokum is steeped in Irish folklore and mythology, primarily revolving around a witch (Cailleach) who is said to haunt the hotel’s ill-fated honeymoon suite. The film includes pagan imagery like protective chalk circles, traditional turnip jack-o-lanterns, ogham writing and even touches upon the spiritual connection historically associated with psilocybin, drawing on our rich history of supernatural superstitions.

McCarthy’s previous features (Oddity and Caveat) dwelt in similar spaces, drawing on old wives’ tales and pagan gods. Caveat prominently features a toy rabbit which can bridge the worlds of the living and the dead, drawing on the hare’s association with witches and the supernatural in Irish folklore. This continues in Hokum, with Baumann haunted by the corpse of a Halloween party attendee dressed as a rabbit.

Like Oddity and Caveat, the film was shot and produced in Skibbereen, in early 2025. When we’re not holding our breath through the claustrophobic corridors of the hotel, we’re treated to lush forests and rolling hills along the West Cork coastline. Though the hotel itself was primarily a set built for the production, the locale never loses its sense of authenticity, and the set decoration boasts an impressive level of detail, even down to a very familiar local newspaper prominently featured.

Baumann toasts ‘Here’s to bleak endings’ in the film’s opening act, referring to the grim fates of his own manuscript characters which bookend the film in a refreshingly ‘novel’ framing device, but also wryly winking at the deaths that await the hotel’s inhabitants. Thankfully, this ethos doesn’t bleed through to McCarthy’s own script, and the story never feels unnecessarily cruel or spiteful.

He’s never quite re-inventing the wheel, but McCarthy clearly has a firm grasp on the genre’s tropes and conventions and how to subvert them. The film is like a briskly-paced ride on ‘The Haunted Mansion’; a series of genuinely entertaining frights that never feel mean-spirited, and unlike the hotel’s resident ghouls, it never outstays its welcome.

Damian McCarthy continues to forge his name as a home-grown horror talent, joining the likes of Lee Cronin and Lorcan Finnegan in a genre which seems to be a natural fit for Irish filmmakers. Despite his films drawing increasingly bigger stars and budgets however, he keeps his scripts and productions grounded in local landscapes and dynamics, proving that sometimes what’s most familiar can be the most terrifying.

Hokum is out in cinemas now.

-Eoin O’Donnell