{Overlook Film Festival 2026} Hokum (2026)

There’s a version of Hokum that doesn’t work. A lesser filmmaker takes the same setup, a grieving reclusive novelist checking into a witch-haunted Irish inn to scatter his dead parents’ ashes, and you get a competent, forgettable haunted house movie. The kind of thing that clogs up streaming queues and generates a small level of buzz on a free streamer like Tubi. Damian McCarthy is not that filmmaker, and Hokum is emphatically not that movie. If a movie could be both absolutely terrifying and quaint it would be a movie by McCarthy and Hokum is his best yet.

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What McCarthy has pulled off here is something genuinely impressive: a film that knows exactly how funny it is and exactly how terrifying it wants to be, and manages to run both engines simultaneously without either one blowing out. That’s a harder trick than it sounds.

Adam Scott stars as Ohm Bauman (yes, that’s the character’s name, yes, it’s probably intentional), a horror writer whose particular brand of creative block involves retreating to a remote Irish inn rather than, you know, dealing with anything. Scott is doing something interesting here. This is not the warm, slightly flustered Ben Wyatt energy, and it’s not quite the deadpan dread of Severance either. Ohm is genuinely difficult, a protagonist you’re not always rooting for, and Scott leans into that without flinching. It shouldn’t work as well as it does. It absolutely works. In the first act Ohm is mean, sharp tongued, and generally shitty to everyone. Its this character arc and growth that makes Hokum feel like an extended episode of Tales From the Crypt (and this year’s Overlook is the perfect place for that).

The Irish setting is doing the heavy lifting aesthetically in the best possible way. McCarthy’s production design here is stunning (5/5, no notes), pulling from a tradition of Irish horror atmosphere that he’s been developing film by film, and Hokum feels like the fullest expression of that sensibility yet. The inn itself is a period-specific pressure cooker that somehow feels ancient and intimate at the same time. Every corner feels like it has a story. Some of those stories are funny. Some of them will make you grab your armrest. The basement though, thats reserved for fear. These set pieces give the entire film a 60’s style Hammer feel that warmed my heart before it scared the crap out of me.

And then there’s the jump scare. You’ll know the one. It’s the kind of formally elegant shot that makes you immediately want to rewind and figure out how he did it, except you can’t because you’re too busy catching your breath. McCarthy’s been building toward setpieces like this since Caveat, and the craft on display in Hokum‘s centerpiece scare sequence, the editing, the sound design, the way the camera behaves, is the work of someone who has genuinely mastered this particular instrument.

The tonal comparison that kept coming to mind is The Shining by way of Wes Anderson. That sounds like it shouldn’t cohere, and the fact that it does is a testament to how confident McCarthy is behind the camera right now. This is a very confident film. It knows it’s good. It earns that confidence.

If there’s a caveat (no pun intended), it’s that the film occasionally oscillates between the thematically vague and the thematically obvious in ways that can feel slightly at odds with how precisely engineered everything else is. The trauma-informed horror architecture is all there, the addiction subtext, the depression, the writer’s block as genuine psychological collapse, and it mostly lands. But every so often Hokum tips its hand a beat too early, or holds a metaphor just a little too long, and you feel the scaffolding.

That’s a minor complaint about a film this enjoyable and this well-made. The jokes land. The scares land harder. The atmosphere is so fully realized I just want to live there. David Wilmot and the supporting cast are doing sharp, funny work around Scott, and the whole film moves with an economy that makes its runtime feel tight in exactly the right way.

Damian McCarthy has been one of horror’s most interesting working directors for a few years now, quietly building a filmography in the Irish tradition that keeps getting better and more assured. Hokum is his best film. It’s also, depending on how the rest of 2026 shakes out, a serious contender for one of the best horror films of the year. Go see it in a theater, with a crowd. There is a jump scare that made everyone gasp and then laugh out loud. Its everything we want it to be.

Hokum opens in US theaters May 1, 2026 via Neon.