Nicolas Roeg's first film for 12 years has an unborn baby as its central character. The baby has been conceived by liffey (Kelly reilly), an architect who, when renovating an old house in Ireland, has a fling with the sexy husband of Mabs, her nextdoor neighbour (Miranda richardson).

Mabs is furious because she wanted a child herself, having lost a son in a fire some years earlier. So is her witch-like mother (rita Tushingham), who devises a few voodoo methods to try to prevent the birth.

We discover that liffey is actually pregnant with twins, one of whom is aborted. But the other remains in her womb. "life," as roeg says, "is so full of stories of love, jealousy, hope and sex, of horror, grief and joy. But however they are told, they all begin and end the same way."

When those stories are being filmed by the director who made Performance, Don't look Now and The Man Who Fell to Earth, you can be sure that surprises are in store.

In Puffball, Dan Weldon's adaptation of his mother Fay's novel, roeg inserts a series of slightly weird pieces of film which have sperm swimming towards wombs and babies cuddled up in them. The result is what one might call a kind of pregnant thriller, with plenty of sex thrown in. It might almost be entitled Hot Comfort Farm.

No one could call this roeg's best work but it still shows us a director who, though now 80, has a few tricks up his sleeve. Donald Sutherland, almost a roeg regular, has a couple of scenes as liffey's visiting boss, but I'm not quite sure why.