Hokum Film Review: Loud Doesn’t Equal Scary

Hokum has little to offer in scares other than loud noises and crazy faces, leaving you with a hollow hotel stay that calls for an early checkout.

Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott, of Severance) is a reclusive novelist who retreats to a remote inn where his deceased parents – whose ashes he plans on spreading there – had spent their honeymoon. Ohm encounters strange folks with clear secrets to hide, only forming a decent connection with the hotel bartender (Florence Ordesh) and the kooky woodsman (David Wilmot, of Hamnet). But when he’s trapped in the hotel’s honeymoon suite by supernatural entities, he’s forced to revisit the horrific scars of his childhood.

For a little while at the start, I thought Hokum would deliver the goods. It opens about the last way I would’ve expected by showing a scene from the book Ohm can’t seem to finish, for reasons that become clearer by the end. Ohm himself is played excellently by Adam Scott, who brings his usual sardonic wit to a character you’re almost baited to root against. But you don’t quite get there because, just through some brilliant acting decisions and perfectly chosen visual details, you understand what he’s been through long before it’s explicitly shown or harshly spoken about.

Now, when you hear about a writer driving up to a secluded, haunted hotel, your first thoughts may go to The Shining. My fear was that Hokum could have ended up being a watered-down version of that movie, but it’s thankfully not. It’s a watered-down 1408 instead. That film, a Stephen King book adaptation, is also about a writer trapped in a haunted hotel room which uses the sins of his past against him. The difference is that 1408’s hauntings are more immediately and thoroughly tied to its main character’s life while using a variety of creative setups and editing choices to really get under your skin.

Sometimes the hauntings in Hokum feed directly into what happened to Ohm in the past, but most of the middle portion is otherwise littered with generic scares that could happen to any character in any haunted house movie. By the time Ohm has his big, emotional third-act breakdown in which he finally reconciles with his inner demons, it feels like nothing because he hasn’t actually confronted them. So, what you’re left with is just a story about a man trying to escape a haunted hotel, and the visceral genre thrills that come with it… or, in this case, the lack of said thrills.

Hokum does what the worst horror movies do: it confuses scary with loud. The sound in this movie is so obnoxiously mixed to make you jump at every single slightly loud noise, let alone the many full-force jump-scares that do nothing other than send a shock to the system for a few seconds. That is how the film “scares” you. And yes, I must admit that it worked on me and that I was scared several times. But it was all hollow and cheap.

Director Damian McCarthy is capable of stringing together stretches of suspense, playing with dark spaces and patiently winding up the viewer. But once I caught on that every single payoff was just the obvious jolt I knew was coming, the novelty wore off very quickly. The actual set pieces are intriguing to look at, sure. The honeymoon suite is packed with old-timey details that tell their own little stories, which I’m sure people will get a kick out of digging through like historians on repeat viewings. But if nothing terribly interesting or suspenseful is being done with these details, that can only get you so far.

Beyond that, Hokum is just a checklist of horror tropes. There’s a room that’s forbidden to enter? Gee, I wonder if our protagonist will go in or not. An outsider is coming to the protagonist’s rescue? Gee, I wonder what’ll happen to him when it seems he finally succeeds. Even Scott’s performance takes a hit in the ending, where you’d swear something far less traumatic happened to him if you watched him out of context. A movie like Bring Her Back also has a lot of old conventions, but it pushes every possibility of its story to the absolute limit and is genuinely disturbing. Not just because of what you’re seeing, but why you’re seeing it. 

Hokum acts like there’s greater meaning behind everything, but all the backstory and character setup is window dressing to the slog of a haunted house trip. Which wouldn’t even be a big issue if I was simply entertained rather than just wanting to get the ear-piercing experience over with. This isn’t the pure bottom of the barrel when it comes to horror, but it has nothing special outside of its first half hour and very final scene that brings the film’s opening full circle. (If you see the film, no pun intended there.) Needless to say, I won’t be checking back in any time soon.

Hokum will be released in globally in theaters on May 1, 2026.