Could have been terrifying, settled for interesting

Hokum wants to be a folk-horror fever dream, but it’s more like a handful of strong ingredients tossed into the same pot without ever becoming a cohesive meal.

There’s a lot to like about it. The movie is tense, often smart about space, and genuinely unsettling in some spots. The Inn, where most of the story unfolds, is a great container—boxed-in rooms, tight corridors, weird little compartments (the dumbwaiter, the bed, the cubby under the desk) that slowly make you feel claustrophobic in a satisfying way. The atmosphere is doing the work. If you’re the kind of viewer who can clock the pattern, the jump scares are still well-timed, landing at expected but unexpected moments.

But here’s my problem: I never felt like Hokum knew what its thing was.

It’s set in Ireland, and it borrows Irish folklore, but the location and the folktale don’t meaningfully drive the plot. You could swap in another country’s story, swap out a different monster, change the accents, and the engine of the movie would run exactly the same. If you’re going to send your character on a pilgrimage to the place where the myth lives, why isn’t the myth central to what’s happening?

Then there’s the “haunting” problem. Hokum has several, and they don’t add up to a whole. There’s Ohm’s mother (sometimes a death-state presence, sometimes whole), there’s Jack the Jackass (a childhood TV figure who could have made the movie a complete fright), and there’s the witch (a basement-dwelling crone in a hobbit hat). These presences feel like they’re from three different movies: grief horror, hallucination horror, and folk horror.

The marketing doesn’t help. The scariest part of this movie is that damn donkey (that looks way more like a rabbit) plastered all over the promos. The rabbit image works; it creeps you out immediately. So you spend the beginning equating it with “witch,” building a dread that feels earned. And then…the rabbit barely matters. It shows up once clearly and once as a shadow. That’s it.

Structurally, the film gives us Ohm Bauman: a novelist, both parents dead, arriving in Ireland to spread their ashes at the inn where they honeymooned. Ohm is a cartoonishly huge dick—loud, critical, performative. Adam Scott can absolutely play that kind of character (he’s famously great at it), but here it felt forced, like the movie needed him to be abrasive so it could justify punishing him later.

After some interactions with Alby (the bellboy) and Fiona (the bartender), Ohm hangs himself in his suite, only to be cut down in time by the duo. From there, Hokum shifts into its main plot: Fiona disappears on Halloween night, Ohm gets nosy, and the Inn’s staff closes ranks. Jerry, the forest guy, points him toward the honeymoon suite, and of course Ohm breaks in…because horror protagonists are legally obligated to touch the thing everyone told them not to touch. Mal eventually finds him, then locks him in when Ohm calls the dumbwaiter…where Fiona’s dead body is.

All this is great. Lots of well-timed scares. Then Ohm gets into the basement, and we meet the crone who is NOT the scary rabbit. She lives in this long, stone hallway that looks old, but then she lives behind these double restaurant doors? They seemed so out of place.

As we hit the climax, turns out Mal is the real evil here. It’s not a new plotline, nor is the “twist” doing Hokum any favors. There’s a second twist with the “maybe none of this happened” angle: Alby gave Ohm mushrooms, so now everything is up for grabs. Did the witch exist? Which parts were real?

And the emotional thread that’s supposed to unify everything—the guilt and “atonement” around Ohm’s mother—doesn’t land for me at all. The film implies that Ohm needed forgiveness, that his mother didn’t forgive him, that this is a moral debt. But Ohm was ten when his mother died; it was a failure of adult responsibility. I don’t buy the idea that the afterlife version of his mother is holding a grudge. If the mother is a manifestation of his guilt, sure, I see that. But the movie flirts with treating it as literal moral condemnation.

So where does that leave Hokum?

With a lot of tension, a genuinely strong sense of atmosphere, and a few standout scares (Jack’s face behind gauze is the kind of image you want this movie to build around)… but also with too many moving parts: folk horror on top of lit-horror on top of murder mystery, hallucinations, childhood trauma, a basement soul-hoarding witch, and a rabbit that’s somehow both the scariest thing in the movie and basically irrelevant.