Adam Scott Anchors Hokum as Damian McCarthy Returns to Horror
Adam Scott gives hokum its center as Ohm Bauman, a novelist hauling his parents’ ashes to the Billbbery Woods Hotel in Ireland. The setup is quiet, then quickly turns into a missing-person story inside a hotel with rules of its own.
Ohm is not just any writer. He built a popular trilogy around a Spanish warrior, then heads into the Irish woods carrying the past with him, including a room at the hotel where his parents honeymooned. The honeymoon suite is off limits, which is the first signal that McCarthy is not treating the building like a normal stopover.
Billbbery Woods Hotel
Fiona works the hotel bar and leads Ohm to his room, a small but useful detail because the film keeps its drama in the building instead of scattering it across wider folklore. The review also notes that the hotel’s grounds come with legends about a witch, and McCarthy uses that setting to keep every interaction inside the same uneasy frame. That is the point of the movie’s eerie riff on The Shining: the hotel itself becomes the pressure system.
One month later, Ohm wakes up in a hospital after something tragic happens. When he returns, manager Peter Coonan tells him Fiona has been missing for several weeks. The police are looking for a tramp living in the nearby forest, played by David Wilmot, because he may know what happened to her. Those are not decorative details; they are the story’s moving parts, and they turn a writer’s homecoming into a disappearance case with a body count of memory and blame.
Damian McCarthy After Oddity
Damian McCarthy arrives here after Oddity in 2024, and that matters because he has already shown a taste for mysteries with supernatural edges. Hokum keeps that approach but narrows it around Adam Scott’s character, who is already burdened by the image of the tormented novelist. The review’s blunt opening line says it best: “Everyone’s got their demons.”
“This is not a movie about conquistadors.” That line from the review cuts through Ohm’s trilogy backstory and puts the real emphasis where it belongs: on a man whose literary success does nothing to protect him from the hotel’s hold. “Yeah, it’s, um, bleak.” The movie seems built for viewers who want horror to work through place, absence, and a character who arrives with grief already packed in his bag.
For Scott, the practical takeaway is simple: Hokum extends the run of horror work that fits him well, and McCarthy gives that run a more confined, more sinister setting than most genre vehicles bother with. If you want the film’s hook in one line, it is this: a novelist, his parents’ ashes, a missing hotel worker, and a room in Ireland that should have stayed closed.
