Hokum Has Something More Interesting in Mind Than Another Bleak Ending

Spoilers ahead for the plot and ending of Hokum.

Hokum starts at the end — not the end of the film’s plotline but the end of a story being written by novelist Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott). We watch as a conquistador and a young boy travel across the desert with a map in a bottle. When they reach what they’ve been searching for (perhaps treasure but, more urgently, a way out of this wasteland), the conquistador finds the cork is stuck. There’s nothing on hand to break the bottle with, despite his best efforts. “Can’t end like this,” he says, but his fate is sealed by the words on Ohm’s computer screen: “They were doomed.” There may be one unpleasant path forward, though. The conquistador realizes a human skull could be hard enough to shatter the glass. He forces the boy to stand with his back to him, before lifting up the bottle, ready to strike.

We don’t see what happens next, mercifully. But Ohm later relates his story, meant to finish up a trilogy, to Fiona (Florence Ordesh), who tends bar at the Bilberry Woods Hotel in Ireland, where the author has traveled to spread his parents’ ashes. “It’s so bleak,” Fiona tells him. Ohm reveals the conclusion may be open-ended before toasting “to bleak endings.” This conversation — coupled with what we see of the conquistador’s story — primes us for something similarly dark at the end of Hokum. Films like this one, heavily indebted to Irish folk horror, rarely wrap up cleanly. Even Ohm’s suggestion that Fiona wait for the inevitably sunnier movie adaptation of his book feels like a misdirect. As it turns out, though, writer-director Damian McCarthy has a surprise up his sleeve. With Hokum, he delivers something we haven’t seen from him before: a happy ending.

For those who aren’t familiar with McCarthy’s work — and if you’re not a Shudder subscriber, there’s a good chance you’re in that camp — Hokum is his third feature. His previous two films, 2020’s Caveat and 2024’s Oddity, are nerve-jangling ghost stories about very bad people trying to get away with very bad things. In this one, there is a ghost and a witch, the latter confined to the hotel’s closed-off honeymoon suite. More pressingly, however, there’s a mystery. When Fiona disappears, local oddball Jerry (David Wilmot) is the chief suspect. He swears he’s innocent, but he believes Fiona is dead inside the hotel. Jerry tells Ohm he has seen her ghost pointing him to the honeymoon suite. With the hotel closing for the season, the two decide to break in to investigate. While the men are creeping around separately, Jerry is apprehended by a hotel employee, Fergal (Michael Patric), who hauls him off to the police station. That leaves Ohm to explore on his own, and a bell ringing from the honeymoon suite invites him up to the supposedly cursed room.

This is, of course, a terrible idea, but for a man eager to dismiss the supernatural as “hokum,” there’s little cause for alarm. While he doesn’t encounter the witch in the suite — at least not yet! — he has other haunting visions. There’s a ghostly appearance from his mother after he falls asleep on the bed and then a nightmarish flash of a ghoulish rabbit face with bulging eyes on the TV screen. These visions seem to stem from Ohm’s childhood trauma: As a kid, he accidentally shot and killed his mom, after which his father descended into alcoholism. But though this troubling backstory speaks to the writer’s underlying issues, there’s still the more immediate problem of Fiona’s disappearance. Ohm finally manages to find her when he calls up the room’s neglected dumbwaiter. There, in the rabbit costume she was wearing when she vanished from the hotel Halloween party, is Fiona, long dead. Unfortunately for Ohm, his discovery coincides with the arrival of hotel employee Mal (Peter Coonan), who promptly locks Ohm in the suite and flees. 

McCarthy’s films often play out like episodes of Tales From the Crypt; they are morality tales in which murderers are punished for their wrongdoing with some supernatural intervention. They are not, as a rule, subtle, so yes, the villain of Hokum turns out to be a man whose name means “bad.” We see via flashback what happened to Fiona: She was pregnant with Mal’s child and had decided to keep the baby. He was scared that his wife would find out — or worse, his father-in-law, hotel owner Mr. Cob (Brendan Conroy), who would surely have sacked him. Mal drugged Fiona at the Halloween party, then took her up to the honeymoon suite and stuffed her into the dumbwaiter, sending it down to the basement and leaving her there to die. As a desperate Ohm ventures down in the dumbwaiter to look for a way out, he discovers he’s not alone: The witch is more than just a creepy legend. In the film’s most harrowing sequence, she follows Ohm up from the basement and into the honeymoon suite, where she chases him to the bed. It’s only by drawing a chalk circle around himself (a trick learned from Jerry’s book on folklore) that he’s able to survive the night.

Nevertheless, things aren’t looking good for Ohm, and that’s before Mal arrives the next day to destroy any evidence of his crimes. Jerry also comes back, having escaped Fergal and now in search of his missing friend. Though Mal tries to convince him that Ohm has returned home to America, Ohm is able to ring the honeymoon-suite bell and lure his friend upstairs. Sadly, Jerry gets a crossbow to the head for his troubles. When Mal starts a fire in the hotel, it really looks like he might get away with triple homicide. But Ohm has picked up some tricks from his time in the room. He takes the dumbwaiter down to the basement, forcing an anxious Mal to follow — and only one of the two men knows how to protect himself from the witch. With Ohm watching from the safety of a chalk circle, she arrives and drags Mal away to join the rest of her tortured souls. Ohm is able to make it back upstairs and out of the suite, but the fire continues to rage, and as he nears the hotel doors, he collapses. 

With Hokum’s foreshadowing of a downbeat conclusion — and considering the rest of McCarthy’s filmography — Ohm’s survival feels unlikely. Without giving too much away about the endings of Caveat and Oddity, McCarthy (like Ohm) leans toward the bleak and open-ended. Yes, the bad guys are invariably punished, but there’s always a cost, and typically one that goes beyond the death of poor Jerry. Hokum, however, has something else in store. Here, Fergal arrives just in time to rescue Ohm, who recovers at a local hospital and seems fundamentally changed by his experience. He appears to have given up drinking and is willing (only somewhat reluctantly) to read Alby’s manuscript. Most significantly, he writes a new ending for his trilogy. In the film’s final sequence, we see the conquistador poised to break the glass over the boy’s head, only to find that he can’t do it. As an act of self-sacrifice, he tells the boy to break the bottle on his head instead. Naturally, the boy can’t follow through either. He throws the glass into the distance and hugs the conquistador. It’s an unabashedly sentimental ending for Ohm’s novel — and for Hokum.

But maybe this is more than just an ending for one film. Couldn’t Ohm’s concern with completing his trilogy be a metacommentary on what McCarthy is doing with this movie? Although Hokum is certainly a standalone film, it’s the third in a series of Irish-folk-horror movies with thematic through-lines and other notable connections. Take the terrifying rabbit toy from Caveat, a version of which shows up again in Oddity and the bugged-out eyes of which look very similar to those on the scary bunny face in Hokum. (That’s to say nothing of Fiona’s Halloween costume.) These films may not be directly related, but they still function as a sequence, and Hokum carries the weight of a trilogy capper much like the conquistador novel that Ohm is writing. After two movies that leave viewers unsettled, McCarthy has delivered a surprising reprieve. It’s a moment of grace that — particularly in the context of all three movies — feels earned.

Is the filmmaker growing soft, or is there something different about Hokum? Like in so much contemporary horror, the answer may come down to trauma (though, thankfully, handled here with a lighter hand and more care than in so many recent films). Trauma has been a fixture throughout McCarthy’s unofficial trilogy. In Caveat, Isaac (Johnny French) and Olga (Leila Sykes) are both recovering from traumatic events that have left them impaired — him an amnesiac, her intermittently catatonic. In Oddity, Darcy (Carolyn Bracken) is driven entirely by grief over the brutal murder of her twin sister. None of these characters achieve true closure, something that Ohm does manage to find in the basement of the haunted hotel. As he hides from the witch, he’s visited by the ghost of his mother, to whom he tearfully apologizes. She grants him grace, and it’s this key moment that truly seems to change him. A character overcoming trauma is not the gut-punch ending that feel-bad horror traffics in, but as McCarthy shows with Hokum — and as Ohm does with his novel — it can deliver an even more satisfying conclusion.