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“We tried to have fun with horror. The critics got it.” In a throwaway line from a minor character, David Cronenberg perfectly encapsulates the pitch black Hollywood satire that is Maps to the Stars, and the polarising reaction it is sure to prompt. Stuffed to the brim with the tropiest of horror tropes (think ghostly children, overly dramatic musical cues and lots of fake blood) and countless nods to an audience steeped in Hollywood lore: this is camp of the highest order.

The film centres around a ragtag band of Tinseltown archetypes, united by leitmotif of Paul Eluard’s poem Liberté. Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore, looking for all the world like a 55-year old Lindsay Lohan in Hervé Leger bandage dress) is the daughter of a deceased Joan Crawford-esque cult icon, haunted figuratively and literally by her mother’s sexual abuse. John Cusack’s Stafford Weiss is a new age guru with a “swaggy” teen heartthrob for a son. Jerome Fontana (Robert Pattinson) is an actor/limo driver who encounters unstable burn victim Agatha (Mia Wasikowska) but can’t quite stay away. As their lives intertwine, a devastating tale of secrets, incest and madness unfolds and it is as gloriously soapy as that sentence implies.

It’s a shame that the film is let down by its pacing. Too much time is allocated to re-establishing that the characters are indeed shallow and two dimensional, leading to a rushed third act featuring deus-ex-machina at odds with the overarching mythological narrative the film tries to present.

These characters are not remotely believable and neither are they meant to be — indeed, combined with the overt symbolism (there is a very clear association between the concept of “star” and the celestial bodies), there are shades of Medieval allegory at work as Cronenberg and screenwriter Bruce Wagner expose the seedy underbelly of modern celebrity culture.