Is this Tim Burton's worst film yet?

Director Tim Burton likes his films busy: watch a classic like Beetlejuice or Batman, and you’ll be pushed to find a single frame that isn’t packed with background detail, weird creatures, ornate furnishings and intricate costumes. The problem with his new film, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, is that the script is every bit as busy and it can get confusing.

Based on a popular young adult novel (isn’t everything these days?), Miss Peregrine is so reliant on backstory that the characters spend significant portions of it just telling each other what’s going on. Not that it helps: with numerous time jumps, face-swapping villains and increasingly complicated rules, the second half is David Lynch-like in its labyrinthine impenetrability.

Which is a shame, because on the rare occasions that it shuts up and gets on with it, Miss Peregrine manages a few pleasingly old-school Burton flourishes: a floating girl; a sunken ghost ship; a Ray Harryhausen-style stop-motion skeleton fight. The characters are too numerous to make much impression – Eva Green is brittle bordering on irritating as Peregrine, and all Chris O’Dowd gets to do is scowl. The effect is like four or five Harry Potter books squeezed into a single movie: it makes precious little sense.