Hokum is the kind of horror movie that stays in the room with you after the credits roll. You turn off the TV, you go about your evening, and somewhere around midnight you realize it is still sitting in the back of your mind. That is the mark of something that actually worked.
Adam Scott plays a bitter, alcoholic novelist who travels to a remote hotel in rural Ireland to scatter his parents' ashes. What he finds there is something genuinely terrifying, and I am going to leave the specifics alone because this is a film that earns its reveals. The less you know going in, the better the experience.
Scott is perfect for this. He has spent years building a reputation as a comedic actor, the dry wit guy, the person you trust to land a punchline. Severance started to show audiences there was more going on underneath, that Scott could play tension and dread and quiet desperation. Hokum takes that even further. His novelist is not a likable man. He is angry, self pitying, and drinking his way through grief he refuses to name. Scott plays all of that without ever asking for sympathy, and it makes the horror land harder because you are watching someone who is already falling apart encounter something that might finish the job.
The film carries a 91% on Rotten Tomatoes, which for a horror movie is genuinely rare. The genre gets graded on a curve by most critics, and breaking 90 means the film transcended the usual conversation about whether it is "elevated horror" or just a scary movie. Hokum is both. It has ideas and it has scares, and it does not sacrifice one for the other.
It shot in County Cork, Ireland, which gives the whole thing a texture you cannot fake on a soundstage. The landscape is beautiful and indifferent, the kind of place where something old could be hiding and nobody would notice for centuries. The film premiered at SXSW, where it won the Midnighter Audience Award, which is the festival's stamp of approval for genre films that connect with a crowd. Neon picked it up and released it wide on May 1.
If you want to prepare yourself, watch Oddity first. You will see why Scott signed on specifically to work with this director. There is a shared sensibility between the two films, a commitment to slow building dread that pays off in moments that genuinely unsettle you. Hokum is the real thing. Clear your evening and leave the lights on.
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