Hokum review: a gothic chiller set in a creepy Irish hotel that expertly weaves horror tropes

By Matt Jacobsen, Senior Lecturer in Film History in the School of Society and Environment, Queen Mary University of London

We are used to seeing the excellent Adam Scott (Severance, Parks and Recreation) in likeable nice guy roles. In Hokum, however, he plays a curmudgeonly and prickly bestselling novelist called Ohm Bauman. Deliberating over the ending to his series of popular novels, Bauman has decided to take a trip to the rural Irish inn where his parents stayed on their honeymoon, to scatter their ashes.

The remote Bilberry Woods Hotel in the off-season is a fantastically eerie horror location. Irish writer and director Damian…

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