Tero Saarinen is one of Finland's most important creative artists, and his career as a choreographer went global long ago. His own company, founded in 1996, has travelled the world, and this brief stop on the South Bank was not its first visit to Britain. But his newest piece, Next of Kin, does make me question his impressive reputation.

The idea, though somewhat hackneyed, isn't a bad one. Exploring our collective unconscious to see how fears are born and how they linger through our lifetimes and down the generations, Next of Kin is like one great big nightmare peopled by vampires, demons and assorted ghoulish extras from a Hollywood B-movie (perhaps one directed by Ed Wood).

The most overpowering influence at work here is the cinema, from European expressionist horror (think Fritz Lang) to cheap Hollywood fright nights. The six haunted dancers adopt a variety of silver screen prototypes, from crazed heroine to lumbering monster, from twitching aliens to the entire Addams Family. The set evokes a long angled corridor full of secret doors. Most of the action takes place behind a gauzy scrim so that everything on stage has the aura of existing at one remove. For the dancers it heightens the feeling that they are trapped inside the labyrinth of Saarinen's bad dream.

The music is composed by Jarmo Saari and played by him on stage. He's a one-man band, who starts and ends by playing a tray of glasses and periodically sends his guitar to the farthest reaches of prog rock. As the protagonist of this tale he also controls the dancers. The lighting ranges from a sharp single source to a diffuse and spooky midnight madness.

Full points for atmosphere then, but practically no points for the excruciatingly bland choreography. Saarinen's cast, whether marauding like Frankenstein's monster or tipping awkwardly like drunks, perform a steady stream of shapeless moves that feel more like blunt force trauma than thought-through choreography.

Inspired by Japanese butoh, this piece wears its expressionist tendencies proudly but to ludicrous effect, never more so than when the dancers start flicking their long hair like models in a shampoo advert. Problems in tone mean that one is never sure whether Saarinen is mocking or being sincere. The heartfelt ending, which offers a kind of transcendent peace, would suggest the latter, but by then it's too late to take anything about Next of Kin seriously.

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