*Hokum* suffers from a frustrating issue: some of its most promising concepts feel like they belong to movies it doesn’t fully commit to. Damian McCarthy utilizes a remote Irish hotel setting to present us with a haunted bridal suite, a large subterranean cellar, a local witch, chalk markings, protective boundaries, psychedelic mushrooms, a missing woman, and a novelist burdened by significant family history. Any combination of those elements could easily carry a horror film on its own. *Hokum* keeps adding more to the mix. What it excels at is generating fear. Faces emerge from shadows, figures appear behind Owen Bauman, and the extended cellar sequences create genuine, palpable tension. Even knowing where the scares were coming from during a second viewing didn't lessen their impact much. McCarthy clearly understands how to effectively startle an audience. The problem lies in those elements rarely feeling connected. The ghost that repeatedly appears behind Owen is eventually revealed to be his mother, but the film withholds the necessary emotional background to make that reveal resonate as anything more than a belated explanation. Owen himself comes across as unnecessarily unlikeable, most strangely when he intentionally heats a spoon and burns the aspiring writer Alby with it. While his subsequent trauma might offer some insight into his behavior, the damage is already done by then. Meanwhile, genuinely intriguing material remains downstairs. Owen discovers a doorway covered in chalk symbols, learns that a protective circle can keep something out, and then importantly finds that an incomplete one cannot. That’s among the film's strongest ideas. The desire arises to understand why those symbols are present, what the hotel knows about them, and how the witch is tied to the location. Instead, the witch largely becomes another tool for delivering scares while the central plot shifts into a murder mystery involving Mel, whose increasingly frantic attempts to hide his actions become so disastrously misjudged that *Hokum* briefly seems poised to transform into a dark comedy. That might have been a more compelling film. So, is it folk horror? It certainly uses the trappings of the genre: an isolated community, old folklore, a witch, subterranean spaces, inherited tales. But strip away those elements and the murder mystery still functions largely unchanged. Folk horror serves as decoration rather than foundation. *Hokum* is therefore a difficult film to recommend. One viewing can be genuinely frightening; however, upon reflection, the gaps in the narrative are apparent beyond just the chalk circle.

Source on TMDB