Now I've seen four movies this year about people trapped in hotels and this latest one is by far the best. So far. 2026's Hokum features Adam Scott as an ornery writer who travels to Ireland to finish writing a novel. He finds himself trapped in a phantasmagoria himself.
Hokum comes from Irish director Damian McCarthy who also directed 2024's Oddity, a good movie, but I'd say Hokum is the superior work. I've seen Adam Scott on Severance and he does a decent job as a generic point of view character.
The hotel interiors are fantastic, with wooden art nouveau panelling. It's clearly sound stages with hallways meant to accommodate camera movement but it's beautifully designed. The exteriors feature spooky Irish woodland settings.
As the story unfolds, the viewer encounters subtle shifts in what genre the movie might belong to. McCarthy plays with the viewer's expectations only enough that one finds oneself in a bracingly unstable situation. There are elements of haunting and of murder mystery and of psychological unreliability. I don't want to explain too much because it's a joy to let it unfold at its own pace. Suffice to say, there's a honeymoon suite which the bartender at the hotel tells Scott's character hasn't been opened in years, there's a bellhop who swears he saw the ghost of a witch in the elevator, and, later, there's a corpse in an unused dumbwaiter.
McCarthy does a fabulous job building mood and tension and making subtle suggestions about character motivations. It's terrific.
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