Hokum Ending Explained

Added: 2026-05-08

[00:00:00]Let's talk about the new film Hokum, directed by Damien McCarthy, who did Oddity, which I really enjoyed a lot.

[00:00:05]You have Adam Scott returning to horror after decades. And this is a film I had the opportunity to watch at South by Southwest about a month ago. And I'll tell you, it was an interesting experience then, and I found myself enjoying most of it, but some of it just wasn't the biggest fan. Check out my review for that if you want. Let's get into the ending and what exactly did it mean? So, the basis of the story, I think, comes with its first opening shot to its final shot, which I think is the conquistador and the young boy. In this little part of the film, which is pretty much the overall, I would say, arc of the film, we see a conquistador with a young boy looking for a treasure, a bottle that the conquistador has that has the map in it, ultimately isn't able to get the map out anymore, and he has to break it somehow. Problem, they're in the desert, there's just sand all over them. There's nothing hard for him to break the bottle with. And that's when he gets the idea to use the boy's head.

[00:00:57]This is, of course, a story that Ohm is currently writing. It's his series and all of that. And we don't come back to this story until the very end of the film. So, let's just talk about what happens with Ohm then. We see that Ohm goes to scatter the ashes of his parents. His mother died when he was very young. His father has recently died as well. And he decides to spread their ashes where they were happiest, and that is at this hotel where there is a honeymoon suite where they are keeping a damn witch. This is a damn witch that's being kept locked. And we don't know exactly if it's true or if it's not. Ohm is very cynical and he doesn't believe in these things, and he's pretty much just saying that everybody's just crazy in this hotel. He's pretty much an [ __ ] as well to a lot of the staff here, especially Alby, the bellhop, who he burns to get out of his like vision, and he's pretty much just a hole all around. Nobody's really like vibing with his vibe here. He does meet a reclusive like homeless man named Jerry who lives around the hotel who tells him about the witch as well and also tells him about this mushroom powder that you can drink and it helps you sort of invite things and being able to see what others cannot see, according to him. One day we see that Mr. Ohm here decides to take his own life, and he is found by the bartender Fiona who saves him and pretty much sends him to the hospital for what has happened. Ohm is like reawakened a new perspective on life now and decides to go thank Fiona for what she did to him, just to find out that Fiona is now missing as well, and Jerry is suspect number one. And Fargo, who works here, he wants to look for Jerry and bring him to custody. We also have Mao here, who is sort of like the manager of sorts, who seems to be hiding something because, yes, indeed, he is hiding something as he actually is the one who killed Fiona, stuffed her body into the dumbwaiter, and sent her down into the basement to never come back, right? And this is through the honeymoon suite that nobody has gone up in a long time because there's a damn witch, according to speculation. Some of the people here, the owner, Alby, Jerry, all claim it's real, while others like Fargo, Alby, might not be too keen on believing this.

[00:03:03]So, we see that Ohm and Jerry plot an idea. Let's go find Fiona. She's up here. She has to be there. And when they do, we see that Fargo comes and takes Jerry. He's going to take him into custody for his belief that he actually killed Fiona. Unbeknownst to him at this point, Mao is the one who did it. And the reason that Mao killed Fiona was because he and Fiona had a thing. Fiona became pregnant, and he didn't want his wife and children to find out. So, he just decided to dispose of her like she was nothing, which very, very sad, honestly. We ultimately see that Ohm gets stuck in the honeymoon suite and begins to get plagued by a lot of things, including, as we find out, that he was the one responsible for his mother's death as he accidentally inadvertently shot her with his dad's gun. And he has been sort of living with this guilt for so long, and his dad has resented him for this as well. During the time that he did this, there was a TV show playing of a donkey character of sorts, and this donkey character is this character you see throughout the marketing, which I thought was the witch at first. Ultimately, it wasn't, but this donkey character comes to haunt Ohm throughout the uh honeymoon suite, and I thought it was very cleverly made as well, this whole idea. But, we also see that he finds the dumbwaiter and sees Fiona's body there now decomposed after days of being there, apparently dead. It seems that she also was seeing things down there as we hear from a tape recording that she had. She witnessed the witch. The witch is real, and Ohm by this point has now seen the witch as well that's trying to crawl up through the dumbwaiter. But, he's able to get away from her, get onto the bed, and draw a circle around him because he found out from a book that the owner had that that was the way that you keep the witch away is with a protective circle around you. So, Ohm's now just trying to figure out how he's going to get out of here. He is locked in the room and he doesn't have a key or anything out. One day we see that Mao arrives, and Mao decides to keep Mao, of course, knowing what's up there in the honeymoon suite decides to lock Ohm in there because he doesn't want the truth about what happened to Fiona to come out, and he's going to just burn down the whole hotel now. That is until Jerry shows up and decides to want to look for Ohm, which Mao says he's left. He's gone to America. You're good, Jerry. Just let it be. But, Ohm's able to ring the bell, which makes Jerry come back and decide, "You know what? I don't believe it. I think there's something going on here."

[00:05:23]They get into a scuffle and everything.

[00:05:25]Ultimately, we see that Mao has started to burn down the hotel at this point.

[00:05:29]Ohm is still up there, and he's like, "You know what? I need to get Ohm out of this. I need to make sure Ohm's dead because if not, the whole truth is going to come out of that I was the one who killed Fiona." So, he decides to go up there chasing Ohm down into the basement with the witch, and this is when we see what the witch actually does. She takes people and lures them into a hellish like room where other like demons and spirits or whatever the hell's in there are going to consume them. Ohm is one of them, and now also Mao will be one as well. However, we see that Ohm has been seeing the presence of his mother throughout the film, come face to face with her where his mother says to not carry this baggage anymore, that it was an accident, and that he should live his life, which helps him to muster up enough strength, draw up a circle and everything so he is safe from the witch taking him. But, he sees that Mao is taken and killed in that room, whatever the hell goes on there, right? Ohm is then saved by Fargo, who does hear a voice of a woman calling for help, and that's to get Ohm out of there, out of the fiery hotel that is now burning down, and he is saved indeed. We ultimately see that Ohm is now getting better at a hospital room. We also see Alby visit him as well, also telling him that he actually had laced his drink with some of that mushroom powder that first night, which maybe caused a lot of the things that happened throughout the nights that followed. And, you know, I was wondering to myself if everything was real or not. Was the witch really out there, or were Jerry and also Ohm the only ones that saw that because they were actually like drinking that powder, and that's pretty much just a hallucination they had, and all of it was just guilt that Ohm had for what had happened. Like, Mao did in fact kill Fiona and all of that and ditched her body down there, and maybe it was just an elaborate idea that Ohm and also Jerry had come up with about the witch.

[00:07:22]Maybe the owner as well at some point had taken the mushroom powder. Who knows? But, the final shots of the film are the conquistador and the boy again as a conquistador decides to not use the boy's head to break the bottle, which would ultimately kill the boy, and decides to tell the boy for him to break the bottle on his head so that the boy can find the treasure and thus be happy.

[00:07:42]The boy decides not to do this either and throws the bottle, and it lands near a skull of an animal, which they're probably going to be able to use once they find out that there is something hard there to use because there's a dead animal skull they can just use now, and everybody will be happy. The end. So, I thought this movie was pretty great. So, the conquistador and the boy was definitely Ohm's inner child and now himself. And at the beginning, we see that Ohm has resentment for his inner child for what he did when he was younger with his mother and the accident with the gun and all of that, and that is why he is so angry at the child because he's angry at his younger self because he inadvertently killed his mom with the gun, and that is why he is trying to take it out on that inner child. And at the end, I think when Ohm realizes that it was not the child's fault, now he wants to punish the older angry self of him, which is the conquistador in the story, and that is why he wants to now sort of take out that person. But, at the end, that embrace, that hug, is Ohm really coming to terms with his whole self. He, young scared child that did the accident, is now able to feel like, "Yeah, I did that accident everything, and I felt for it, and I've been paying a price as an adult now, and I became this angry person that's just bent on like destroying myself, but now I see the truth." And I think that embrace really showcases that Ohm has now really truly healed after this experience. And I think that that was definitely a really tender moment. I really love that. I think that's when McCarthy's script really shines the most is these moments of, I would say, absolution, of feeling like you are embraced yet again by yourself and not like you're isolating or trying to destroy your person. Like, you really do come to terms with who you are, and I think Ohm does that beautifully at the end of the film. The conquistador and the boy were just a very amazing touch to this film that really elevated it a bit more for me. In terms of the witch being real or not, I think it's up to you to decide. Could it be just Jerry and Ohm had these drugs in them that made them see all of these things?

[00:09:47]Because Fargo, I would say, maybe Alby, maybe didn't know about it. Could Alby have had the mushroom powder at some point when he claims he saw the witch when he told Ohm when they were at the bar. A lot of people didn't see the witch really. Fergo as well. Did we see Mao find the witch as well? Maybe he drank some of the mushroom powder as well. Who knows? But if you want to believe it, it's a lot of different possibilities there because one, they could have just been high and just seen things and maybe they just like died down there because maybe Mao like tripped or something or fell. Like Fiona, she could have been just killed by Mao just her body dumped or if you believe that she was killed by the witch, maybe she just got so frightened that she just went cold and died. Or why wasn't she taken into the room? You know, there's a lot of things there. So, you could either believe that the witch is real and that there is in fact a witch in the honeymoon suite that was kept by the owner. You could believe that the powder made them see things that weren't really there or you can believe that the powder made them see things that were there but couldn't be seen with the naked eye. You had to use the powder. Maybe that explains Fiona.

[00:10:53]Maybe she was drugged or like taken by Mao because other people probably knew about these mushroom powders that Jerry had talked about that gave you this heightened sense. So, overall, besides that being real or not, I think that the film Hokum really serves as a great way of showcasing a man who feels extreme guilt for what happened to his mother and has been carrying it ever since and he comes to terms with it by literally descending into the darkest pits of this hotel or his soul, you could say. Doing soul-searching, really. He goes back into his childhood, goes back to these moments that really were like destroying his heart, destroying his psyche and is able to come back with it. I thought it was just a very, very powerful story about redemption, about letting go of guilt, making sure you heal that inner child as well as we see the conquistador with the child ultimately come to terms with one another and accept each other instead of trying to destroy or kill the other which was brilliant. So, very excited to talk more about Hokum. If you want, let me know what you thought about the ending of the film and all that. Do you like this movie more than Audition or you more of a fan of Hokum? Comment down below. Let me know your thoughts and opinions. We just talked about Damien McCarthy doing another haunted house movie for his next film which I think is going to be interesting. So, we'll see what happens with that. We do have a Resident Evil trailer breakdown as well on the way. Very excited to talk about that one and I cannot wait to share more stuff this like May because May is packed with a ton of movies like I'm excited Obsession. We're about to be breaking that down. So, stay tuned.

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