After watching Oddity last year on streaming and loving pretty much everything about it, I was excited when the trailer for Hokum came out and I saw it was from the same writer/director.
Much like the previous film from Damian McCarthy, this one takes some solid elements of folklore and weaves them into a tale of villains, victims, and suffering people. Yes, there are definitely horror elements, but at its core, either film can be seen to be about justice and forgiveness… which can, indeed, be scary things if you’re the guilty or don’t believe you deserve forgiveness.
Hokum presents us with a distinctly unlikeable main character in Adam Scott’s Ohm Bauman. A writer with a bit of a bleak outlook on life who isn’t afraid to rub people the wrong way if he’s bored or annoyed by them. Suffering from a bit of writer’s block about the ending of a popular book series he’s been working on, he decides to finally deal with another thing in his life: spreading his parents’ ashes somewhere.
That somewhere ends up being the forest in Ireland where they honeymooned.
Any details from that point forward are distinctly in “spoiler” territory, so I’m not going to say much more about them. Suffice to say, things take a few unexpected turns.
Much like Oddity, everything that plays out is solidly set up by prior events, even if you don’t realize it at the time (and especially if you don’t know the folklore being drawn from). Since McCarthy does this quite deliberately and quite well, even if you know you’re going to get it, all it does is build more anticipation for the eventual payoff. And just about everything pays off very solidly.
There are more than a few times when all seems lost just before there’s some bit of potential supernatural intervention that goes on. Here it’s nowhere near as overt as it is in Oddity, here it’s easier to explain away… most of the time.
Grief and guilt are brutal things and both are dealt with here by various characters in various ways. Some lash out at others, some lash out at themselves, some try to re-capture a moment of peace. All are on a journey when their paths cross and intermingle.
Some come out of it better than others… but those who’ve grown and changed for the better find a kind of peace.
And those who didn’t? Well… it is a horror film.
As expected, I really liked this and I look forward to whatever McCarthy does next. I also look forward to Scott doing more dramatic work.
- Hokum – October 24, 2026
- The Cycle (2026) – October 23, 2026
- Clayface – October 22, 2026
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