Damien McCarthy brings us a psychological horror about a man trapped in a hotel, forced to process his grief... and maybe deal with a witch too.
There’s a very specific kind of horror movie that gets sold as “the scariest thing you’ll see all year” and then turns out to be something much stranger, quieter, and a lot more internal than the marketing department let on. Hokum is one of those movies.
Written and directed by Damien McCarthy, Hokum drops Adam Scott into an isolated hotel in the middle of nowhere and then slowly closes the walls in around him. By “slowly,” I mean slowly. This is not a movie built around body count escalation, cheap jolts, or a parade of things lunging out of dark corners. It has creepy moments, absolutely, but that’s not really what it’s doing. This is a psychological horror film wearing the skin of a haunted-hotel movie, and whether that works for you is going to depend entirely on your patience for ambiguity, grief symbolism, and watching a man essentially get spiritually workshopped against his will.
The setup is strong. Adam Scott’s character winds up trapped in the honeymoon suite of a hotel after it’s already shut down for the season. He needs to get out. That alone is a decent hook. Then the movie starts layering in the supernatural possibilities: maybe the room is haunted, maybe there’s a witch in the mix, maybe this whole thing is some twisted confrontation with unresolved trauma. Hokum never rushes to explain itself, which is both one of its strengths and one of the reasons some people are going to bounce off it hard.
What I liked most is that the film isn’t cut-and-dry. There’s actual character work here. Early on, I wasn’t exactly on this guy’s side. In fact, I was more or less rooting for the room to make his life miserable. Then the script starts peeling him open, and suddenly the movie flips your perspective without making a big show of it. That’s not easy to pull off. Plenty of films tell you a character is more complicated than they seem; Hokum actually earns that shift. It got me to reconsider him, and that’s when the movie really clicked.
Visually, the film is solid. McCarthy clearly understands that horror imagery does not need to be loud to get under your skin. A lot of the unease comes from faces, expressions, objects framed just a little too long, little figures sitting in the background of the shot like they’ve been waiting for you to notice them. There’s a nasty little visual language here built around staring, stillness, and distortion. The movie knows how to make you uncomfortable without turning every sequence into a carnival haunted house.
That mattered to me because early on I was worried Hokum was going to lean too hard on jump scares. It flirts with that energy just enough to make you suspicious. But then it mostly resists. The film is much more interested in dread than shock. It wants you uneasy, not startled.
That said, I do think this movie is in danger of disappointing the exact audience its marketing is trying to attract. If you go in expecting wall-to-wall horror set pieces, you may come out annoyed. This reminded me a little of the way movies like Crimson Peak or mother! got pitched one way and then revealed themselves to be operating in a totally different register. Not because Hokum is especially similar to either of those films, but because it creates the same mismatch in expectation. It has horror elements, sure, but it’s really about a man trapped in a room being forced to confront his own demons. The witch material is there, but if you’re hoping for a full meal of witchcraft, you’re mostly getting garnish.
And I’ll be honest: I could have used more of that garnish.
You can’t dangle a witch in front of me and then act like I’m unreasonable for wanting more witch. If the movie had leaned just a little harder into that side of itself, I think it could have sharpened the whole experience. As it stands, Hokum sometimes feels like it’s teasing a more overtly supernatural movie than the one it actually wants to be.
At a certain point, the movie also started giving off an energy I did not expect at all: it felt like Resident Evil, but stripped of monsters and combat. I know that sounds ridiculous, but stay with me. Adam Scott’s basically trapped in an enclosed environment, searching for objects, combining ideas, rigging mechanisms, unlocking access to new areas, moving from one unnerving space to the next. There’s even a weirdly puzzle-box rhythm to it. It’s like watching someone play the least violent survival horror game ever made. Fixed camera angles and tank controls are basically the only things missing.
That weirdly worked for me.
What didn’t always work were the supporting characters, who feel very thin by design. There are only a handful of them, and the movie doesn’t seem especially interested in making you emotionally invest in their lives beyond how they reflect or pressure the lead. I get why that choice was made. This is his chamber piece, his psychological maze. Still, a little more weight on the edges of the story would have helped the whole thing hit harder.
The pacing is going to be the make-or-break factor. This is a true slow burn, not the fake kind where people say “slow burn” and mean there are two action scenes instead of six. Hokum takes its time, lingers in mood, and leaves enough interpretive space for film students to dine out on it for an entire semester. If that sounds exhausting to you, fair warning. But I never found it boring. Deliberate, yes. Self-conscious, maybe a little. Boring, no.
And the ending really does a lot of heavy lifting.
Not in a cheap “gotcha” way, but in the sense that the final stretch reframes what you’ve been watching and gives you something to take with you. That’s the part you end up unpacking afterward. That’s the part that sticks. A movie like this absolutely needs to land the last note, and Hokum does.
So where do I land on it? I liked it. Not because it’s terrifying — I don’t think it is, at least not in the way the hype machine wants you to think — but because it’s patient, visually unsettling, smarter than it first appears, and anchored by a character turn that genuinely pulled me in. It’s a moody, slightly hipster pseudo-horror film with more going on under the hood than its premise suggests.
Just know what you’re signing up for.
If you want a haunted hotel freakout movie, this may leave you cold. If you’re open to a slower, more psychological descent with just enough supernatural poison in the bloodstream to keep things unnerving, Hokum is worth your time.
It didn’t scare the hell out of me. It did something better.
It stayed with me.
