He Thought The Witch Was Fake… Until She Started Hunting Him | Horror Movie Recap

[00:00:00]We open on a story within a story. A Spanish concistador and a small boy are stranded in a desert, dying of thirst, carrying a bottle with a map rolled up inside it. The cork is wedged so deep the bottle will not open. They cannot find a rock hard enough to break it. The concisador looks at the boy, looks at the bottle, and an idea occurs to him that he does not act on immediately, but the idea is there. In reality, this is a book, specifically the final chapter of the concisador trilogy by M Balman, a famous American author working late at night at his desk trying to figure out how to end a story he has been writing for years. He types. He stares at the screen. He hears a noise. He looks up and sees what appears to be a figure standing on the stairs. He turns his lamp toward it. Nothing. He lowers the light and the figure is directly behind him. Then it vanishes.

[00:00:55]M opens a box. Inside, old photographs, a hotel card from the Bilberry Woods Hotel in rural Ireland, and a revolver.

[00:01:04]His parents are gone, both of them. The box is all that is left. He looks at a photograph of his mother standing beside a large redwood tree near the hotel. He makes a decision. He arrives at Bilberry Woods, a beautiful isolated property in West Cork, and finds Fergle, the groundskeeper, standing over a dead goat with a crossbow. M asks why he shot it.

[00:01:26]Fergle explains the goat jumps on cars and ruins the paintwork. M suggests he might have simply shed it away. Fergle ignores this entirely. Inside the hotel, the owner, an old man named Cobb, is entertaining two small children with a story about a local witch named Kylock who used to prey on lost travelers. She would place them under a spell, shackle them, and drag them through the underworld, where hands would reach out of the darkness and pull pieces from whatever was at the end of her chain.

[00:01:54]M interrupts by ringing the front desk bell and asks Cobb if these are his children. They are not. M tells the children to find their parents and not talk to strangers. Then Cobb says with complete seriousness that there are things out there far worse than strangers. Mal, the hotel manager, who turns out to be Cobb's son-in-law, emerges from a back room and apologizes for the delay. M checks in. Mal mentions that his son is a fan and asks if he would sign a book. M coldly refuses. He asks for a room as far from the Halloween party as possible. He has work to do. A hotel staff member named Fiona, the bartender, notices M wandering lost in the corridors and offers to show him to his room. He snaps at her. She tells him that with that attitude, he can stay lost. He immediately apologizes. She shows him the way and as they walk asks casually if this is his first time in Ireland. He nods. He finds the redwood tree in the woods using directions from Fiona and scatters his mother's ashes carefully around its roots. His father's ashes he dumps on the ground without ceremony. On his way back, he comes across a man named Jerry who lives in the woods who offers him a drink from a jar. M says he needs something stronger than milk. Jerry says there is nothing stronger than this. M takes a sip. It is moonshine made with magic mushrooms.

[00:03:16]Jerry explains that goats also eat these mushrooms, which is why they jump on cars to stare at their own reflection. M says goodbye and tells Jerry not to climb onto any cars. Jerry says he won't. That evening at the bar, M tells Fiona about the ending of his novel. The concisador kills the boy with the bottle, but the bottle still does not break, and the concisador wanders alone into the desert and dies. Fiona says she will not be reading it if that is how it ends. He says that is what challenging literature is for. He says that she reminds him of his mother. She asks how old he thinks she is. He shows her the photograph. Fiona says she looks happy.

[00:03:55]He tells her his parents came here for their honeymoon and always meant to return. Fiona asks why they never did.

[00:04:01]He tells her his mother died a few years after the photo was taken. She was very young, shot in the face coming home from work. Fiona asks if they caught the killer. He says yes. He was too young to be punished. He should have been hanged.

[00:04:15]Fiona asks about his father. After M's mother died, his father became a monster and drank himself into an early grave.

[00:04:22]He had kept both their ashes for years because he did not know what to do with them. The hotel seemed like the right place.

[00:04:30]M notices that the honeymoon suite upstairs is sealed off. Fiona explains that the room has been closed for a long time because according to Cobb, a witch was trapped inside years ago and has been haunting it ever since. Fiona once tried to convince Mal to steal the key from Cobb so they could go up and look, but Mal was too frightened of his father-in-law. M asks why she is so eager to go up there. She says she wants to find out if there really is a witch.

[00:04:56]He asks what she would do if there was.

[00:04:59]She pulls out a folklore book. According to the local legend, if a witch chases you, all you need to do is draw a circle in chalk around yourself. The circle keeps you safe. M says if he ever believed a witch was chasing him, he would be looking for a psychiatrist rather than a piece of chalk.

[00:05:16]Fiona calls over Albi the bellboy and asks him to tell M about his own encounter upstairs. Ali describes standing near the elevator to the honeymoon suite one night when his hat was knocked off and he peered inside with his lighter and saw the witch in the darkness. M mutters, that's Hokum.

[00:05:32]Fiona is called away by Fergle about a delivery. Albi tells M he is a huge fan of his novels and has read all of them.

[00:05:40]Albi then reveals he is also a writer and asks if M would read his manuscript.

[00:05:45]M presses a heated spoon against Albi's hand. He says Ali will need thicker skin than that if he wants to be a writer.

[00:05:51]Ali storms off. M tells Fergle who witnessed the whole thing never to meet your heroes. Later that night, Fiona finishes her bar shift and notices M has left his recorder and photographs on the counter. She takes them to his room. He does not respond to knocking. She asks Ali to unlock the door with his spare key. Ali suggests M has probably just passed out. She tells him to open it anyway. They step inside and find that M has tried to take his own life. Sometime later, M wakes up in the hospital. He has been unconscious for weeks. When he returns to the hotel, it is emptying out. The season has ended. He tells Mal he only came back to collect his belongings. Mal hands him his things and asks how he is feeling. M ignores the question and asks who found him. Fiona.

[00:06:41]She was working in the bar that night.

[00:06:43]He asks if she is around because he would like to apologize to her. Mal shakes his head. Fiona has been missing since the Halloween party which took place weeks ago while M was in the hospital. Nobody has seen her since.

[00:06:56]M cannot accept this. People do not simply disappear. He asks about the hotel, the woods, whether everything was searched. Mal explains that police officers are looking for a man named Jerry who lives in the woods. Fergle saw Fiona talking to Jerry on the night she disappeared and nobody has seen her since. After she vanished, police dug into Jerry's background and discovered he had also disappeared for a period after his wife died under suspicious circumstances 10 years earlier. Mal tells M to go home, get some rest. On his way out, M stops Fergle and asks about Fiona. Fergle says Fiona seemed distracted on the night she disappeared.

[00:07:35]Still in shock, he thinks from having to cut M down. Fergle insists Jerry obviously killed her. When M asks if the honeymoon suite was searched, Fergle says it is always locked and Cobb keeps the only key. He checks the lock personally every day. When M asks if the police spoke to Fergle, Fergle replies that the officers speak to him every day because they are his first cousins. The sergeant is his uncle. Fergle's parting advice to M is to get in his car and drive to the airport while he still looks like his passport photo.

[00:08:07]M gets in the car and drives, but not to the airport. He stops at the edge of the woods and goes looking for Jerry. He finds the old van, opens the back door, and finds Fiona's folklore book inside.

[00:08:19]Jerry appears and says Fiona would be glad to know M is awake. M tells him Fiona is missing and demands to know if he had anything to do with it. Jerry says no. M points out that the police are also looking at him for his wife's death 10 years ago. Jerry admits it. She was terminally ill and in constant pain.

[00:08:40]He ended her suffering. It was the only way. As for Fiona's book, they were friends and she lent it to him. M urges him to come with him and talk to the police. Jerry says it would be pointless because they would never believe him. He does not know exactly what happened to her, but he knows she is dead.

[00:09:00]Jerry explains that two nights earlier, he snuck into the hotel to take some medicine from Mal's supply cupboard.

[00:09:06]While inside, he heard a bell ringing and went to check. It was the old mechanical call bell connected to the honeymoon suite. Fiona's ghost was standing beneath it, pointing at it. He believes she wants him to go up there.

[00:09:20]The hotel will be empty tonight. He has the key. He stole it from Cobb's house.

[00:09:25]He asks M to come with him when the time comes. They are going to need each other. At night, M looks at this man drinking mushroom moonshine who insists these things do exist. It is only closed minds that cannot see them. They wait for the last car to leave the parking lot. Then they move. Jerry unlocks the front door and they slip inside. Jerry goes to get his crossbow from Mal's room for protection. M waits. Fergle was waiting. He grabs Jerry, knocks him out, and emerges carrying the crossbow. He contacts his cousin to say he is bringing Jerry in. M hides in the darkness. When Fergle leaves with Jerry, the call bell connected to the honeymoon suite suddenly rings on its own from somewhere above. M realizes he still has the key. He unlocks the elevator shutters and steps inside. The elevator takes him to the honeymoon suite. He steps out into a dim room that has not been occupied in years. A clock on the mantle with a small boy figurine that strikes a bell with a golf club every hour. An old bathroom with a bathtub filled with black stagnant water. A large bed. Silence. He searches every corner. No sign of Fiona. No witch. He sits on the bed and drinks steadily from his flask until exhaustion takes him and he falls asleep.

[00:10:48]In his dream, he is 10 years old watching his favorite television show, Jack the Jackass, while handling his father's revolver. The gun goes off. His mother comes home at that exact moment.

[00:11:01]She was shot in the face. He was the one who shot her. His father hated him because of him.

[00:11:08]He wakes to Mal standing over him in the suite. Mal asks where he got the key. He says Jerry gave it to him. He believed Fiona was up here. Mal asks where Jerry is now. He says Fergle took him to the police. Mal suggests they go downstairs before they get into trouble. M is about to follow when he notices a dumb waiter built into the wall. A small freight elevator sealed. He asks where it leads.

[00:11:36]Mal explains there used to be a basement beneath the building before it became a hotel. During renovations, the entrance was lost and nobody has been able to access it since. M reaches for the button. Mal tells him firmly there is nothing down there. M presses it anyway.

[00:11:54]The dumb waiter rises. Fiona's body is inside. Mal bolts from the room and locks the door behind him. M is trapped in the suite with Fiona's body. He rushes to the window. He watches Mal drive away and leave him there. The film flashes back to Halloween night. Fiona was with Mal at the front desk. M's recorder on the counter. She's worried about M and talking about him. Mal asked her to finish her tea while it was hot.

[00:12:22]She drank it. Within minutes, she was dizzy, then unconscious. Mal put her in a wheelchair and brought her up to the honeymoon suite. He put her in the dumb waiter and pressed the button, sending her down into the basement. Back in the present, M finds his recorder beside Fiona's body. He plays it. She recorded messages while she was still alive in the basement. Her name is Fiona Kate.

[00:12:46]She is in the basement of the hotel. She is pregnant. Mal is the father. He was not happy about her keeping the baby.

[00:12:54]She never intended to tell anyone he was the father, but Mal was terrified his wife or his father-in-law, Cobb, would find out. She cannot believe he would go this far. She's going to try to find a way out. If she doesn't make it, whoever finds this should know Mal is responsible.

[00:13:11]M begins searching the suite. He finds a small locked door beneath a table. He takes a knife and starts removing the screws. Meanwhile, Jerry regains consciousness in the back of Fergle's moving vehicle. He frees himself and jumps out while the vehicle is moving.

[00:13:25]Back in the suite, M removes the first screw. The second is damaged and will not budge. He puts the knife down and looks around for another way. Then he notices the dumb waiter has descended again on its own. M hears crying somewhere in the suite. He follows the sound into the bedroom. The lights go out. He grabs his lantern. A knock at the door. He rushes to it, shouts for help, looks outside. Nobody there. The television switches on by itself. The program on the television is Jack the Jackass, his childhood show. Jack begins reading a letter. The letter is from 10-year-old M. He writes that his mother died the previous year after he accidentally fired his father's gun while playing with it. He says his father hates him now. He misses his mother. He is scared all the time. He asks Jack if he can help. Jack replies that his father told him not to touch the gun, but he did anyway, and his wife got her brains blown out. There is no help coming. He should be afraid. The television shuts off. M drinks from his flask and looks at an hourglass. It has figurines of the concisador and the boy from his novel on top of the sand. The boy figurine appears to be pointing to one side of the room. The clock strikes, and when M looks back, the figurines have vanished. He goes in the direction the boy was pointing and finds a map of the building revealing that the basement contains a fire exit. The recorder starts playing again on its own. Fiona's voice. The dumb waiter button down here is broken. She cannot get back up. She is stuck. M looks at the clock and has an idea. He removes the bell from the mechanism and places it beside the dumb waiter button so that the boy's golf club strikes it every time the clock chimes. Using the clock to press the button on a timer, he places Fiona's body carefully in a chair. Then he climbs into the dumb waiter himself and descends into the basement. The basement is a long, dark corridor with strange objects hanging from the ceiling, including Alb's lighter, which he had lost months ago. M follows the corridor deeper. He reaches a solid brick wall.

[00:15:29]There is no exit. The map was wrong or the exit has been sealed. He sits against the wall, flask empty. Then the recorder starts playing by itself again.

[00:15:39]Fiona's voice. She thinks there is someone down here with her. M hears footsteps approaching from the darkness.

[00:15:46]He runs back toward the dumb waiter. He notices markings on the wall and finds a piece of chalk on the floor. He picks it up. His watch beeps. He has already spent an hour down here. The clock mechanism should have activated by now.

[00:15:59]He waits at the dumb waiter. Nothing happens. The lights go out. Something is moving toward him in the dark. Then the dumb waiter rises. He glimpses the witch emerging from the corridor as the elevator carries him up. He makes it back to the honeymoon suite, but as soon as he is out, the dumb waiter starts descending back. M looks down and can see the witch climbing up. He slams the shaft closed. He runs toward the bedroom, but the door is locked. He goes in through the bathroom window and locks it. Then the witch enters the bathroom.

[00:16:31]Desperate M pulls the chalk from his pocket and draws a circle around the bed on the floor. He climbs on. The witch enters the bedroom, approaches the circle, and stops. It moves around the perimeter again and again, but will not cross the line. M sits on the bed watching it circle. The chalk trick actually works. He realizes Fiona was right about everything.

[00:16:54]In the morning, Mal returns to the hotel to find the front door open and blood on the floor. He finds Jerry at the elevator, badly injured, repeatedly trying to force the shutters open to get up to the suite. Jerry tells him is trapped and needs help. Mal says he already found Om drunk in the suite and drove him into town and put him in a taxi to the airport. He is probably already there.

[00:17:17]Upstairs, M steps out of the chalk circle and looks through the window. He sees his car doors open. Jerry is down there. He searches for the call bell mechanism, finds it, and starts ringing it. M starts ringing the bell. Only Mal hears it, not Jerry. He comes back in.

[00:17:34]He forgot the car keys. He tells Mal that Fiona always said never to ignore a feeling when something seems off and something feels very wrong right now. If Mal already drove to the airport, why did he come back to the hotel? Mal says he came back to get a photograph reframed for his wife. Jerry asks if he really drove all the way out here just for that.

[00:17:56]The honeymoon sweet bell rings again.

[00:17:59]Jerry grabs an axe and demands the key.

[00:18:02]Mal hands it over, already beginning to unravel, muttering that Fiona was not a good person, that she was threatening to tell Cobb everything. Jerry does not stop to listen. He heads upstairs. Mal covers a heater with a blanket, setting the stage for a fire that will destroy all evidence inside the hotel.

[00:18:21]Jerry reaches the suite and breaks through the locked door. He calls for M.

[00:18:26]M tells him Mal killed Fiona. Before Jerry can react, Mal appears in the doorway and fires a crossbow bolt. Jerry falls. Mal goes back down, but forgets that Jerry still has the elevator key.

[00:18:38]Meanwhile, M takes the key from Jerry and hides. He goes back up again. Mal searches Jerry's body for the key, but can't find it. The fire alarm begins blaring through the building. Mal searches for M, then uses the intercom to address him. The hotel is on fire.

[00:18:53]There is no way out from down there.

[00:18:55]Come back with the key and they can both escape. He moves deeper into the dark corridor. He hears the witch ahead of him and pulls the chalk from his pocket to draw a circle. But the witch finds him before he can complete it. Mal follows him into the basement. He spots a key hanging from the ceiling, puts down his lantern and crossbow, and reaches for it. Before he can take it, the witch grabs his wrist and shackles it. She picks up Mal's lantern and starts dragging him deeper into the corridor. In the darkness, M's mother appears to him. He tells her it was an accident. He never meant to shoot her.

[00:19:30]She tells him gently. She knows he cannot stay here. She disappears.

[00:19:36]M has his blade in his pocket, the same blade Fiona used to cut him down when she found him, and cuts through his shackle. The witch opens a door and drags Mal toward the lost souls beyond it. M takes the key and runs for the dumb waiter. He makes it back up, gets to the regular elevator, and starts descending. The smoke is already thick.

[00:19:56]He collapses before he reaches the exit.

[00:19:59]Fergle has returned to the hotel calling for Mal. He hears a voice, M's mother's voice, calling his name. He follows the sound and finds M unconscious near the elevator. He carries him out of the burning building.

[00:20:13]Later in the hospital, Albi visits. He is now working at an ice cream parlor next door. He brings a bottle of whiskey from Fergle, who is devastated about Fiona. Investigators found remains at the hotel belonging to both Fiona and Jerry. Mal's car was found outside, but Mal himself is still missing. Then Ali admits something. After M burned his hand at the bar that night, Ali was angry. He found M's flask of whiskey in his room and spiked it with Jerry's mushroom powder. He asks if M drank it.

[00:20:45]M says he drank all of it.

[00:20:48]M looks at his wrists. The bruising from the shackles is still there. He remembers something Jerry told him out in the woods. All these things do exist.

[00:20:57]People with closed minds just cannot see them. The mushrooms open his mind. And M had been drinking something very similar on a night he spent inside a room with a witch. He turns the thought over in his hands without quite arriving at an answer.

[00:21:12]Albi asks before leaving whether M would be willing to read his manuscript after all. M says yes.

[00:21:20]M sits alone and rewrites the ending of his novel. In the new version, the concistador asks the boy to break the bottle over his skull. Break it. Do not stop for blood or bone. Follow the map.

[00:21:31]Claim everything for himself. He holds the bottle out. The boy looks at him for a long moment. Then he throws the bottle away. He wraps his arms around the concistador instead. In the sand beside them lies the skull of a goat. Hokum is the kind of horror film that understands scares only work when the characters matter first. Director Damen McCarthy balances supernatural terror with something far more human. Guilt. The witch is real. The haunting is real. But the film is ultimately about M. A man who has spent years burying a trauma so deep that it has shaped his entire life without him ever confronting it. Adam Scott delivers what may be the strongest performance of his career. His cold, detached portrayal of M slowly reveals the pain beneath, making the basement confession, "I never meant to shoot her land with devastating force." Florence Orch brings warmth and emotional weight to Fiona. While David Wilmont is excellent as Jerry, a character who seems unhinged, yet turns out to be right about everything, the third act moves faster than the rest of the film, sacrificing some of the slowbuilding dread that makes the earlier sections so effective. Still, the emotional payoff remains strong. What truly elevates Hokum is its ending. McCarthy refuses to explain away the supernatural while also leaving room for doubt. The final image, a rewritten ending, a gesture of forgiveness, and a goat skull resting nearby, perfectly captures the film's themes of grief, guilt, and the choice to abandon violence in favor of acceptance. Overall, I will give it a 8.5 over 10 rating. A ghost story that knows exactly what it is haunting. One of the best horror films of the year.

[00:23:17]That's Hokum. If this is your kind of content, like, subscribe, and join me one story at a time. See you on the next one.