Hokum, Starring Adam Scott, Is a Horror Salad With Too Many Ingredients

Damian McCarthy’s Hokum throws a lot at the wall to see what sticks; unfortunately, little of it does. This movie is part Irish folklore, part murder mystery, part Stephen King riff (by way of a troubled writer at a haunted hotel), and a few other things thrown in for good measure. All of these come wrapped in a distant, haphazard aesthetic approach that robs the film of its tension and scares, resulting in too much and too little all at once. McCarthy generally knows how to build tension, if his 2024 Irish supernatural revenge thriller Oddity is anything to go by. However, Hokum falls victim to stylistic over-familiarity from the moment it begins. Its opening images, removed from time, feature a desperate conquistador and his young ward wandering through the desert in search of water and treasure. They are soon revealed to be part of the writings of secluded American author Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott), who types away at his desk in the darkness. He spots a human shape on the stairwell in the distance, and then much closer to his table, but points his desk lamp at it, so it disappears. It’s a fun little flourish à la David F. Sandberg’s Lights Out, but this tug-of-war between light and