Hokum

Australian Premiere

“...a good old-fashioned ghost story, the kind you’d tell over a campfire to scare children. And it’s a hair-raising one at that.” – IndieWire 

Damian McCarthy has done it again. The Irish writer-director behind the beloved cult hit Caveat (2020) and the SXSW Audience Award-winning Oddity (2024) returns with this supernatural slow-burner starring Adam Scott (Severance) and shot on location in the wilds of West Cork.

Where McCarthy’s earlier films unsettled using atmosphere and isolation, Hokum pushes further, threading grief, psychosis and folk legend into a knot that never quite loosens.

When reclusive novelist Ohm Bauman (Scott) retreats to a remote Irish inn to honour his parents’ final wishes, the staff’s murmured tales of a witch haunting the honeymoon suite begin to feel less like folklore and more like warning. Visions bleed into waking life, a shocking disappearance upends everything, and Bauman is dragged into a confrontation with buried family secrets, and a malevolent force that has been awaiting him.

Following its SXSW world premiere, Hokum makes its Australian Premiere at FFFA as our opening night film, trailing serious heat.

Festival Appearances & Awards
SXSW 2026 – World Premiere