The 'Severance' star goes darker than usual in this tale of haunted hotels, Irish folklore, and a missing woman

Everyone’s got their demons. Writers, admittedly, tend to have more than most, and writers in movies? Forget about it. They’re a virtual seventh circle of hell. Hokum gives you a taste of one tormented scribe’s fiction before introducing you to the man behind the keyboard. A conquistador wanders a barren desert. A child, face covered in dirt, trudges behind him. There’s a map, leading to treasure (we assume), stuck in a bottle. The only way to get it out, apparently, is to break the bottle open, but on what? The lost soul focuses on the only thing hard enough to shatter glass: The boy’s skull. Yeah, it’s, um, bleak.

The preamble is a feint — spoiler: this is not a movie about conquistadors — but it does serve to set up the troubled mindset of the “hero” of filmmaker Damian McCarthy’s uniquely creepy story of things that go bump in the psyche. The author of this imagined stand-off is Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott), and the scene he’s typing out on a dark and stormy night is the climax to his popular trilogy of novels about a Spanish warrior. The books have made famous enough to get recognized in public, but they haven’t cured him of his existential ills. Two urns, labeled Mom and Dad, sit on his mantle. A wooden box containing a snubnose revolver seems to hold a particular fascination for him.

There’s also a faded, creased photo of Ohm’s late mother when she was a young woman, standing by a large redwood in the Irish countryside. He remembered her talking about this being a happy place for her. So, in hope of a sense of closure, he travels deep into the woods of the Emerald Isle with his parents’ ashes. He books a room at the Billbbery Woods Hotel, where his mom and dad honeymooned all those years ago. The vibe is old-world hunting lodge meets quaint traveler’s inn. The lobby is where the elderly owner scares children with tales of a witch who once haunted these grounds. The honeymoon suite is off limits. That’s a long story.

The thing about Ohm is… well, in addition to being plagued with issues, he’s kind of an asshole. That’s also a long story, which Hokum eventually gets around to filling in the blanks. Still, this misanthrope takes somewhat of a liking to Fiona (Florence Ordesh), the woman who shows him to his room and tends the hotel bar. Then something tragic takes place. When Ohm wakes up in a hospital a month later, he returns to the Billberry. The manager (Peter Coonan) informs him that the place is now empty; they’re closing up for the season. He also tells Ohm that Fiona has been missing for several weeks. Plus, the police are looking for a tramp (David Wilmot) who lives in the forest nearby, and may know something about what happened to her.

McCarthy’s previous movie, Oddity (2024), involved a mystery, a M.I.A. woman, and various supernatural happenings in symbolically shadowy corridors and dark corners as well, though that was the sort of horror outing that, as a whole, never quite added up to the sum of its jump scares. This eerie riff on The Shining feels as if the Irish writer-director has a better grasp on both the catch-and-release tension that the genre needs and the balancing of sharp shocks and slow-simmering dread. You might still associate Scott with comedy, though two seasons of Severance has more than proven he can go to dark and dramatic places when needed. Hokum requires him to heavily rely on that particular skill set, as well as letting him lean into the user-unfriendly aspect of his character. He should do horror more often.

The title, by the way, refers to Ohm’s opinion on the Irish folklore about supernatural happenings that people take serious around the place. Let’s just say his perspective on the subject changes drastically before the end credits. It also pays to remember that malevolent spirits often pale in comparison to the more human monsters in our midst, though you should never count out a good yarn about crazy crones and centuries-old curses. Sometimes, those personal demons will be the death of you. And other times, said demons may not be as figurative as you’d like to believe.