There are hotels where you worry about bedbugs. There are hotels where you worry about whether somebody wiped down the remote. And then there is the godforsaken Irish inn in Damian McCarthy’s Hokum, where the honeymoon suite is boarded up because apparently a 400-year-old witch has decided late checkout is for pussies.

Welcome to Ireland, Ohm Bauman. Enjoy your stay. Try not to die. After Caveat and the wonderfully fucked-up Oddity, McCarthy returns with another exercise in making perfectly ordinary rooms feel like someplace human beings absolutely should not be standing, and Hokum confirms that the filmmaker understands one of horror’s simplest rules: what you don't see standing in the darkness is frequently a hell of a lot scarier than whatever eventually steps out of it.

Adam Scott plays Ohm Bauman, a successful American horror novelist who arrives at the remote inn carrying the ashes of his dead parents and enough emotional baggage to require its own fucking luggage cart. This was where his parents honeymooned, which makes returning their remains here either incredibly sentimental or the beginning of a spectacularly terrible decision. Probably both.

Ohm isn't particularly likable, either, and thank Christ for that. Scott doesn't sand down his edges to make him some cuddly grieving widower wandering through a ghost story. He's bitter, arrogant, exhausted, self-destructive and frequently an asshole. He's also exactly the sort of guy who hears that a boarded-up room might contain something supernatural and eventually starts poking around because horror movies require people incapable of recognizing when the universe is screaming LEAVE IT THE FUCK ALONE.

McCarthy takes his sweet time tightening the screws. The hotel is cavernous, gloomy and seemingly capable of swallowing people whole. Hallways stretch into darkness. Doors become threats. Empty rooms somehow feel occupied. The surrounding countryside doesn't provide relief because Ireland itself seems to be conspiring against Ohm. Then come the stories about the witch. The honeymoon suite. The visions. The locals who know more than they're saying. And because this is the guy who made Oddity, McCarthy knows exactly how long he can leave the camera pointed toward an apparently empty patch of darkness before your eyes begin inventing monsters. Then something moves. Maybe. Fuck. Did it? That's where Hokum works best. McCarthy doesn't merely show us frightening things; he makes us search the frame for them.

The movie gets weird, too. Gloriously, sometimes frustratingly weird.

Hokum isn't interested in remaining a polite haunted-hotel movie, and its mixture of folklore, grief, black comedy and psychological disintegration becomes increasingly slippery as Ohm loses whatever grip he had when he arrived. David Wilmot is especially good at throwing gasoline on the movie's stranger tendencies, while Florence Ordesh brings a wonderfully grounded presence to a story increasingly willing to crawl sideways into madness. There's humor here, but it doesn't puncture the horror. It makes everything feel slightly more unstable. You laugh, relax for half a second, and McCarthy uses that opening to shove something unpleasant into your peripheral vision.

The biggest surprise might be Scott himself. Anyone expecting his familiar comic rhythms gets flashes of them, but Hokum gives him something nastier to chew on. Ohm is a prick. Sometimes a funny prick. Sometimes a pathetic prick. Occasionally the kind of prick you wouldn't cross the street to save from an approaching bus. Yet Scott keeps just enough humanity buried beneath all that misery to make his unraveling matter. The grief underneath Ohm's cynicism slowly becomes the movie's real haunted room. That's the trick McCarthy keeps pulling with his horror films: the supernatural stuff gets us through the door, but there's usually something painfully human waiting inside.

Is Hokum as immediately vicious as Oddity? I'm not convinced it is. Oddity felt like somebody had sharpened the entire movie into a weapon. Hokum wanders more. It fucks around. It occasionally becomes so enamored with its own mystery that you want to grab it by the shoulders and tell it to get moving. But the wandering ultimately becomes part of its personality.

This is Gothic horror allowed to breathe, rot and get strange. McCarthy understands atmosphere, he understands the horrible possibilities of empty space, and most importantly he understands that audiences who have watched thousands of horror movies can still be reduced to nervous children staring into a dark doorway waiting for something to appear. That's not hokum. That's horror. And McCarthy remains damn good at it.

4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray Edition

Home Video Distributor: Decal Releasing
Available on Blu-ray - August 11, 2026
Screen Formats: 2.39:1
Subtitles: English SDH, French, Spanish
Video: Native 4K; HDR10
Audio: English: TS-HD Master Audio 5.1
Discs: 4K Ultra HD; Blu-ray Disc; Two-disc set
Region Encoding: 4K region-free; blu-ray locked to Region A

WE’VE BEEN EXPECTING YOU.

From Oddity and Caveat filmmaker Damian McCarthy comes another wonderfully fucked-up descent into supernatural dread. Reclusive novelist Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) travels to a remote Irish inn to scatter his parents’ ashes, only to become obsessed with stories surrounding an ancient witch said to haunt the hotel’s sealed honeymoon suite. Disturbing visions, a sudden disappearance, and some seriously questionable decisions soon drag Ohm into a nightmare connected to his own past. Check into the hotel. Listen to the stories. Whatever you do, don't go looking for the witch

VIDEO

NEON and Decal's 4K Ultra HD presentation of Hokum is exactly the sort of transfer this movie needs. Presented in its original 2.39:1 aspect ratio at native 2160p, the disc preserves McCarthy's deliberately gloomy photography without turning the movie into an indecipherable black blob. This is a film built around shadows, dim hotel corridors, candlelight, dirty interiors and the nagging suspicion that something unpleasant might be standing just beyond what you can see. The added resolution gives those environments terrific texture: weathered walls, clothing, faces, woodwork and the damp Irish landscape all benefit without making the image look unnaturally sharpened.

HDR10 handles the darkness especially well. Blacks are appropriately deep, but shadow detail remains strong enough that you're constantly staring into the corners of the frame trying to determine whether McCarthy has hidden something there. That's important because Hokum weaponizes negative space. Highlights are restrained rather than retina-searing, and the intentionally muted palette isn't suddenly transformed into some candy-colored HDR showcase. Good. It shouldn't be. The transfer respects the miserable, cold, haunted look of the movie. This isn't the disc you throw on to show somebody how bright your television gets. It's the disc you use to show them what good 4K does with darkness.

AUDIO

Here's the one slightly irritating decision: the disc gives us an English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track rather than carrying over the theatrical Dolby Atmos experience. Considering how dependent Hokum is upon sound coming from places you don't necessarily want sound coming from, Atmos would have been fucking perfect. Still, don't mistake the lack of overhead channels for a weak presentation. This is an aggressive, wonderfully creepy lossless mix.

The surrounds stay busy with environmental noise, movement, creaking architecture and those tiny sonic details McCarthy uses to make you question whether something just moved behind you. Dialogue remains clean and centered while the low end has considerably more muscle than you might expect, giving some of the movie's nastier moments genuine physical impact. Silence matters just as much. The track can become incredibly quiet before suddenly spreading activity across the room, and that dynamic range is exactly what this kind of horror needs. Yes, I would've loved Atmos. No, I'm not going to pretend this 5.1 mix doesn't kick ass anyway.

English SDH, French and Spanish subtitles are included.

Supplements:

Commentary:

• Feature Commentary with Writer/Director Damian McCarthy

Special Features:

Thankfully, NEON didn't just dump the movie onto a UHD and call it a day. The two-disc 4K UHD/Blu-ray combo includes a compact but worthwhile collection of extras, beginning with a behind-the-scenes making-of documentary that gives McCarthy and company room to dig into the production. For a movie so dependent upon location, atmosphere, practical spaces and carefully controlled scares, getting a look behind the curtain is particularly welcome.

Even better is the feature commentary with writer-director Damian McCarthy. After Caveat, Oddity and now Hokum, I'm perfectly happy listening to this guy explain how he figures out new ways to make rooms terrifying. The original teaser and theatrical trailer are included, but the oddball cherry on top is Jack the Donkey, A Family Favorite, a short film that expands the disc beyond the usual promotional-material dump. It's not a Criterion-sized archaeological excavation, but for a brand-new 2026 studio horror release, there's enough here to make buying the physical edition feel like buying an actual edition rather than an expensive plastic container for a digital file.

• Behind-the-Scenes Making-of Documentary
• Feature Commentary with Writer/Director Damian McCarthy
• Jack the Donkey, A Family Favorite — Short Film
• Original Teaser
• Theatrical Trailer

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