Joel Thornton

TW: suicide

Just thinking about writing about Hokum (2026) has been by far the most work I’ve ever done for bite mag – much more than you’re about to read. My brain has been a mile a minute for weeks, toiling over the bits and pieces that make up Damian McCarthy’s latest 107 minutes of folkloric psych horror. How will I order any of this? What will be my approach? Not to let the cat out of the bag too early, but it’s hard to centre one’s thoughts on something that’s itself so, shall we say, “freeform”.

One decision I could make quickly was to abandon my usual spoiler-free style of review in favour of something much more direct, as writing around specific plot beats in this instance would seem like wilful ignorance to a whole herd of elephants in the room. There are a lot of things I simply have to rummage through that go way beyond general vibe, direction and aesthetic, production elements and message. I have to get in the weeds – so spoilers it is, and this is your absolute final warning to get out of here if you’ve not yet seen the film.

Into the woods…

American author Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott), labours over an ending to his hit ‘Conquistador’ trilogy, and decides to travel to the rural Irish hotel that his parents honeymooned at many years ago to scatter their ashes. He also hopes to use the change of scenery as something of a writer’s retreat. Arriving at Bilberry Woods, a restless and agitated Bauman makes a horrible first impression with the staff for a litany of reasons and generally comes across as a complete dickhead. He’s clearly going through a tough time, and one night, having set his parents to rest at the foot of an old redwood, still feeling burdened and at his wit’s end, Bauman decides to hang himself in his hotel room.

It’s around this point that I’m going to struggle to be concise and not loop back around to this or that, as there’s already tiny things omitted from that summary that will or won’t play a part in how all of this unravels. I know.

He’s cut down by a member of staff – surviving the suicide attempt – but by the time he wakes up, said staff member is missing. Before the attempt, two ideas are introduced: that the honeymoon suite of the Bilberry Woods is closed, off limits, even possibly haunted, and that there’s a local man in the area who does a ton of psychedelic drugs. Still with me?

We’re setting up for Bauman to go and explore the honeymoon suite in pursuit of the woman who saved his life (a young bartender named Fiona), and naturally confronting his own family history in the process. First though, of course, the hotel has to close for the season or somebody on site would surely drag him out.

If reading the work that it takes – all the random events, coincidences and timings that must align – to get to the meat of the film seems contrived and annoying, then don’t worry, you’re very much still with me.

…and out of my mind

I think the main thing that irks me about this film is that the hotel appears to be only incidentally haunted.

That’s right, the fact that it’s haunted has nothing to do with either parent’s ultimate demise; it’s instead just a fun coincidence – something to move the plot along now that we’re here, where the whole thing will take place.

It’s revealed that Bauman accidentally shot his mother dead as a young boy and drove his father to years of alcoholism (and eventually his own end). This would be interesting to see through if it wasn’t unknown to the characters around him, who have all identified Ohm Bauman, Famous Writer, by name.

Pause for a second and think about how successful a writer has to be in order to be identified, by name, by several people at a tiny hotel in Nowhere, Ireland. This is a fucking household name à la Stephen King and yet no one knows anything about him shooting his mother in the head? In an age where those who stream to 500 people get their home addresses found in half an hour? I just do not buy it whatsoever.

I also refuse to hear any argument for “he is being haunted, it’s not supposed to be literal” or the like, because if that were the case, the film wouldn’t jump through as many hoops as it does just to set up its third act.

There are also far too many characters privy to any given action – or directly causing it – for this to remain an in-tact thread that holds up to even minor scrutiny. There’s as little room for ambiguity as there is for narrative/visual coding, which would surely be essential to guiding any non-literal interpretation of events. The door that is left open for your imagination is one of the most boring options of all time: that the third act was all a hallucination (deus ex drugs guy!). Unless Bauman arrives at Bilberry drugged up and bonkers (he doesn’t), it wouldn’t realistically change a single thing. The honeymoon suite is in fact closed off and outright feared from the first frame that it’s introduced, when Bauman strides by with his luggage fresh from the airport (and as alluded to, two characters stand in front of it freaking out about if it’s secure enough).

It’s such cornered and trite writing I barely want to entertain it, but bafflingly, that’s in there if you want it. The last few scenes even decide to double down on it. Personally, I’m always going to see this trope as plausible deniability for poorly written scripts, up there with the likes of “was it all a dream?” and “they were dead the whole time”. I have also heard people legitimately opt for the latter, claiming Bauman dies during the initial suicide attempt and the rest of the film is his personal hell. Christ.

Don’t get me wrong, I love an open-ended story – something with the wiggle room to ruminate on further meanings. I love getting outright conspiratorial over tiny bits of dialogue or visual blips and where they might be leading me. The thing about the inclusion of such materials is that they’re ordinarily allowed to exist in their own space. Hokum, however, is an insecure mess of uneven ideas, all skyrocketing one another off the scale. There aren’t too many interesting ways to think about it that aren’t directly contradicted by something else included.

There are definitely good movies to be made with the three or so set-ups that this movie tries to haphazardly tie together into one cogent thing. It just cannot and does not function as one. The whole film is a Pollock of ideas, and alright I know it’s called “Hokum”, nonsense, bullshit… but that doesn’t console so much as it does enrage.