SXSW 2026 Review: HOKUM, Be Very Afraid Of Damian McCarthy's Latest

In 2024 Damian McCarthy lit up the horror world with his quietly terrifying Oddity, a film I reviewed for its SXSW world premiere, and while it was topping year end horror lists left and right, I was a bit less enthusiastic. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed the film, and have seen it a couple of times since, but I felt like there was just something missing that couldn’t quite put my finger on.

Here we are two years down the road and McCarthy is back, and it’s time for his close-up. This time around he’s back at SXSW with the world premiere of Hokum, backed by the indie powerhouses and Oscar-machines at NEON, and starring one of Hollywood’s most dependable actors, Severance’s Adam Scott. Whatever it was that was missing from Oddity for me is here in spades with Hokum, a nonstop fright factory that immediately bumps McCarthy into the upper echelon of contemporary horror filmmakers alongside people like Ari Aster and Oz Perkins.

Ohm Baumann (Scott) is an author with issues. While struggling through his latest manuscript, he decides to deliver his parents ashes to a remote Irish hotel where they stayed once upon a time. Ohm has complicated memories of them both as a childhood tragedy took his mother from him and his father never quite looked at him the same. This trip is meant to be something of a catharsis, an exorcising of personal demons, and perhaps a way to put an end to the trauma and guilt that have followed him in the wake of the loss of his mother. What he doesn’t know is that the hotel and its staff have other ideas of what to do with him, and perhaps the trauma is just beginning.

Much like Oddity, Hokum is built around haunted spaces and objects. The rural Inn where we spend the vast bulk of the film is a character on its own, rustic to near the point of decrepitude and populated and frequented by a quirky cadre of staff and locals, it’s the kind of place a man could easily disappear into, and for Ohm, that might be more literal than he’d expected. When one of the staff disappears after saving his life, Ohm tries to find out what happened and winds up exploring the never-to-be-booked honeymoon suite. Upon his entry the room turns on him, which leads to nonstop hauntings and violent visions that may or may not be real, trapping him with not only his own demons, but also a few indigenous ones as well.

Adam Scott is perfect casting for the role of the somewhat flippant writer who doesn’t believe in the woo-woo bullshit that is rumored to haunt the hotel. This makes it all the more satisfying when he falls victim to the inn’s labyrinthine machinations to keep him there to atone for his sins. Complicating matters is an innkeeper with a secret who is just as determined to make Ohm disappear as the spirits haunting the premises. It’s a gripping story that unrelentingly ramps up the tension while simultaneously delivering some of the year’s best jump scares.

Fans of Oddity will find a lot to enjoy here as McCarthy is generally painting with the same palette of colors, but with more refined eyes and ears this go around. The inn itself is a masterpiece that would find itself at home in a classic Corman Poe production, with only a few modern touches to bring it into the 21^st century. In his introduction, SXSW senior programmer Peter Hall described the film as feeling like a Stephen King story that King never wrote, in this case there are big time echoes of 1408, but this one succeeds in ways that film couldn’t quite manage and delivers on the promise of the premise.

Though it feels like we have reached a saturation point for trauma-informed horror over the last five or six years, it takes a film like Hokum to remind us that it is not necessarily the repeated themes that are a problem so much as their treatment. Hokum is very much a story about a man struggling to reconcile with a tragic past, but it is also a film about a man fighting for his own future against enemies both from within and without.

Hokum is scary as hell, but never forgets to be entertaining, with a black as pitch sense of humor from McCarthy’s script that Scott is the perfect vehicle for. The humor never threatens to overwhelm the scares though, as it is used as a carefully calibrated release valve for the unrelenting tension and dread that Hokum masterfully inflicts upon both his characters and the audience. That, combined with delightfully disorienting production design around the inn, a musical score and sound design that will set your hairs on end from start to finish, and cinematography that puts us into the world in a way that only perfect lighting can, and Hokum is a damn near perfect horror film. Go see it when it hits theaters, just don’t go alone.