Adam Scott faces his worst nightmare in Hokum, and it’s not another corporate retreat at Lumon Industries. The Severance star plays a horror novelist who travels to a remote Irish inn to scatter his parents’ ashes, only to discover that grief is the least of his problems. What follows is supernatural horror filtered through Irish folklore, because apparently regular ghosts weren’t terrifying enough.
Damian McCarthy directs with the same precision he brought to Caveat and Oddity, establishing himself as Ireland’s answer to Mike Flanagan but with more rain and fewer monologues about grief. Adam Scott faces practical effects and creeping dread rather than CGI specters, which makes every creaking floorboard and shadowy corner feel earned rather than manufactured.
The Hokum poster alone deserves recognition for restraint—no floating faces, no blood-drenched typography, just Adam Scott looking appropriately haunted while the Irish countryside looms behind him like a threat. Adam Scott faces this challenge with the same deadpan energy that made Severance’s Mark Scout so compelling, suggesting that his particular brand of barely-contained anxiety translates perfectly to horror protagonists who make terrible decisions in dark hallways.
Joining Scott are David Wilmot and Peter Coonan, Irish actors who understand that regional horror works best when the location itself becomes a character. Adam Scott faces not just ghosts but the weight of inherited trauma, parental expectations, and whatever ancient evil happens to be squatting in the family inn.
The horror novelist angle provides delicious meta-textual potential—Adam Scott faces the same creative anxieties his character presumably suffers, wondering whether his latest work will connect or collapse under its own ambition. Hokum suggests that sometimes the scariest stories are the ones we inherit without choosing.
Check in if you dare—see Hokum in theaters and watch Adam Scott face the Irish supernatural without a single severance procedure to save him.
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