Hokum (2026) Characters, Setting & Themes Explained

A weathered Irish groundskeeper at The Bilberry Woods Hotel who knows the place's secrets. He appears cautious and protective, guiding Ohm through the hotel’s strange atmosphere and later assisting in the ongoing struggle as the building burns. His practical, steady presence contrasts with the room's hidden dangers.

• 🏞️ Local
• 🧹 Groundskeeper
• 🛡️ Protective

A local with a troubled past who drinks mushroom-laced milk and buries a goat. He becomes entangled in Fiona's disappearance and claims to know Fiona’s ghostly trajectory, raising suspicion around the hotel’s events. His insistence on a supernatural narrative escalates the tension and culminates in a violent confrontation.

• 🕯️ Complex
• 🥃 Local
• 🔬 Suspicious

A successful writer trying to craft the ending to a popular trilogy. Ohm is emotionally wounded by his parents' deaths and his own guilt, which drive his increasingly unstable behavior. His journey through the hotel’s mysteries becomes a meditation on storytelling, memory, and the possibility of redemption.

• 🖋️ Writer
• 🧩 Trauma
• 🌀 Metafiction

A vision of a Spanish conquistador who embodies the book’s allegorical struggle with fate and mercy. He attempts to break the bottle to end the story, but ultimately is spared in a twist that reframes violence as mercy. The character functions as a narrative mirror for Ohm’s struggle with endings.

• 🏜️ Desert
• ⚔️ Conquistador
• 🗡️ Allegory

A spectral presence whose murder created the trauma at the core of Ohm’s life. Her ghost appears to offer guidance, acknowledging Ohm’s guilt and urging forgiveness. Her memory anchors Ohm’s emotional arc and fuels the drive toward an ending that reconciles past with present.

• 👁️ Ghost
• 💔 Mourning
• 🕊️ Guidance

A calculating, dangerous figure connected to the hotel’s darker history. He manipulates events to keep Fiona from escaping and ultimately murders her ally Fiona’s boyfriend? He opposes Ohm’s quest for a humane resolution and ends up confronting a supernatural reckoning as the hotel burns.

• 🗡️ Antagonist
• 🕵️ Manipulative
• 🔥 Dangerous

The hotel owner who exerts a chilling, controlling presence. He blocks access to the honeymoon suite and embodies the hotel’s sinister mythology. Cob’s authority masks deeper, more treacherous motives and his fear of external scrutiny shapes the hotel’s perilous atmosphere.

• 🏨 Owner
• 🧭 Mysterious
• 🔒 Controlling

The bellhop who both idolizes Ohm’s writing and incurs Ohm’s scorn. He is a conduit to Ohm’s experiences inside the hotel and a participant in the events’ surreal, dreamlike quality. His vulnerability and attempts to connect through writing add a layer of youthful hope amid the horror.

• 🧒 Bellhop
• 🎨 Aspiring writer
• 🗣️ Insecure

A young traveler in the hotel who contributes to the eerie, childlike atmosphere. His presence underscores the motif of innocence within a place of danger, and he serves as a contrasting counterpoint to the adults’ burdens and betrayals.

• 🧒 Child
• 🌀 Echoes of innocence
• 🕳️ Mystery

A hotel guest who is pregnant with Mal’s child, making her a focal point of jealousy, power, and survival within the hotel’s haunted social web. Her disappearance and the subsequent revelation of her death drive the investigation and deepen the sense of peril in the hotel.

• 🤰 Pregnant
• 🧩 Mystery
• 👀 Ghostly presence

A legendary figure tied to the hotel’s folklore and the woods beyond. The witch embodies the fear of being hunted and the underworld’s pull, appearing in visions and in the hotel’s unsettling, supernatural atmosphere. She represents a moral reckoning for the characters’ actions.

• 👻 Mythic figure
• 🌿 Woodland lore
• 🕸️ Supernatural

The film is built around storytelling as a living, mutable force. Ohm Bauman uses the ending of a popular book trilogy as a device to probe truth, memory, and guilt, while the desert vision and hotel sequences blur lines between fiction and reality. The pseudo-epilogue framing and Metafictional chat with characters like Alby highlight how stories direct our actions and destinies.

Trauma threads through Ohm's past and present: the murder of his mother, his father's decline, Fiona's pregnancy and subsequent disappearance, and the guilt that drives Ohm to confront a haunted past. The hotel becomes a crucible where buried memories surface, manifested as visions, ghosts, and a dangerous dynamic among the inhabitants. The chalk circle and protective devices symbolize attempts to contain emotional danger.

Witchcraft, legends, and hokum drive the eerie atmosphere. The local myths—of a witch in the woods, haunted honeymoon suites, and messages from the afterlife—serve as both menace and redemption. The film blurs folklore with psychological horror, turning superstition into a tangible force that shapes characters' fates.

The narrative pivots on mercy versus violence. The Conquistador arc ends not in murder but in an unexpected act of mercy, reframing doom as a possibility for grace. Mal's malice collides with a supernatural reckoning, while Ohm’s last act of freeing himself and choosing life marks a reluctant, hard-won redemption.