Hokum
**"Maybe I should start drawing circles whenever life gets a little too suspicious."
**🏃♂️⭕⭕⭕⭕
I genuinely cannot remember the last time a horror movie made me this uncomfortable.
I was sitting there STRESSED during the first half, fully convinced something awful was waiting in every corner uncomfortable. I was literally holding my breath the entire time like the witch could hear me through the screen.
Hokum follows a grieving writer named Ohm Bauman who travels to Ireland to fulfill his parents' final wishes, only to find himself entangled in something far older, darker, and far more personal than he could have imagined. What begins as a quiet folk horror slowly descends into a nightmare where folklore, guilt, memory, and reality become impossible to separate.
And holy shit.
The atmosphere is absolutely suffocating. Every hallway, every doorway, every shadow feels wrong in a way that your brain can't fully explain. The film understands that what you don't see is often scarier than what you do, and it weaponizes that feeling like CRAZYYYY. Even the jump scares don't feel traditional. They don't just yell "BOO" and move on. They creep in, ruin the vibe, disturb the air, and suddenly your body is in shambles.
And then came the climax. And then came that plot twist.
That fucking plot twist.
The kind of twist that makes you sit there like… wait. WAITTTT A MINUTE. Suddenly the whole movie starts rearranging itself in your brain like some brainrot. It was literally up and above my expectations.
And just for the record, I just wanna say. Fuck you, Mal.
As someone who hasn't seen the director's previous films, this was one hell of an introduction.
I don't know if Hokum is the scariest movie I've ever seen. But I do know it made me feel like I had accidentally wandered somewhere I wasn't supposed to be.
And some stories, once believed, don't fully disappear. They live and continue to thrive on the back of our minds, because not everything is what it seems.