I don't know how many other people feel this, but I feel a strange kinship to movies about (or that depict) the COVID pandemic. Part of the appeal we all (the makers and audience) want in stories on screen is that even though they depict people and situations we don't know and have never seen, they contain universal themes that we all recognise and respond to, and there's rarely been any other event that touched us all so deeply in our lives.

The relatability in this film is there, particularly in scenes where the hero Jonathan (Brendan Hines) spends the entire day at the small hotel bowling alley. We all found ourselves in similar feedback loops in worlds shrunk to the size of a house or room.

Unfortunately depending on your taste for this sort of thing, the directors/writers are more inspired by David Lynch, piling enigmas on top of riddles to create a fever dream nightmare that parallels how stir crazy lockdowns made many of us but isn't really about it – and doesn't really explain itself either, rendering the whole exercise less than satisfying.

A smug movie star is on the phone to his wife or girlfriend while he sits beside the pool in the famed Hotel Roosevelt in LA, planning the entire time to try and bang the attractive young maid attending him. Later we see him walk down a deserted corridor after her and leave through an outside exit, only to fall and stagger back inside, covered in blood and mortally wounded.

It presently cuts to Jonathan and Sara (Tatjana Marjanovic), who are at the Roosevelt on their honeymoon when lockdowns hit. With everyone else having been sent home or retrenched, the only staff who remain to take care of them are the manager Ty (Kevin Daniels) and the mysterious young Polish maid we've already met, Adela (Ola Kaminska).

The couple are newly in love but they have history, especially Sara's apparent case of manic depressive psychosis she keeps at bay with medication, leaving her (and us) wondering what's going to go happen when it runs out. The pair also alternately bond and argue with Ty and Adela, the relationships strained and containing a lot of passive aggressive overtures as the cabin fever starts to fray everyone's nerves.

But both Jonathan and Sara start seeing strange things around the hotel, there seems to be something or someone hidden in the bathroom of one of the rooms (a broad nod to The Shining, however intended), and when we see Adela seemingly desecrating the unconscious body (maybe corpse) of the movie star we met in the beginning, it all seems to reveal there's some sort of witchcraft or devil worshipping thing going on.

It has an assured sense of its own weirdness and a moody, sinister aesthetic and the cinematography, editing and other filmmaking crafts are all top notch, but the writer/directors are much more interested in increasing the paranoia and tension than telling you a cohesive story with a beginning, middle and end which pays it off.

With long shots of empty hallways and hotel interiors that should be bustling with people (to say nothing of streets like Hollywood Boulevard in one of the most crowded cities in North America) it's not just the bathroom body that alludes to The Shining. Like that film, they're interested here in what isolation does to the psyche, and while it's visually evocative at times, it would have been more successful all round if it wasn't such a head scratcher in the bargain.