The excitement of seeing a new film by Nicolas Roeg (Don't Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth) carries one through the first 30 minutes or so of Puffball, his first film in 11 years. There's an off-kilter thrill to the compositions, and the basic scenario – a pretty young architect, Liffey (Kelly Reilly), incurs the voodoo-tinged wrath of her neighbours while renovating a cottage in rural Ireland – seems in line with the director's art-spook leanings. There's space carved for Roeg's usual virtuoso carnality, starting with an outdoor sex scene between Liffey and her boyfriend that culminates in the kind of money shot rarely seen outside of health class.

It's a show-stopping moment, and the sudden, literal shift to the interior anticipates the biological concerns of the script (by Dan Weldon, adapting his mother Fay's novel): an examination of the impact of pregnancy on an isolated, mostly female community. It also heralds the film's collapse into silliness. Roeg labours to italicize key images (i.e., a very large rock with a very suggestive hole), but loses his grip on the story. We're slowly bludgeoned by disastrous musical cues, crazed performances, turgid eroticism and loudly over-stated themes. Eventually and exhaustingly, every scene takes on an air of hysteria.

“My brain feels like porridge,” sighs one character late in the game, and it's easy enough to identify with her distress. It's also easy to laugh at Puffball's reckless, Skinemax-vintage excesses. What's harder – and necessary – is to acknowledge that only a true and uncompromising artist could ever make such a vivid mess.