Festivals are two-a-penny these days, but Manchester’s distinguishing feature is its commitment to commissioning new work - in this case from the improbable trio of documentary maker Adam Curtis, experimental theatre company Punchdrunk and musician Damon Albarn.

The result is a hugely ambitious, unwieldy event that combines the terror of a house of horrors with an immersive investigation into American power and glory, and its seedy underbelly, between 1958 and 1965.

Promenaders take the lift in small groups to the sixth floor of an undistinguished office building. We pass through dark corridors and intricately detailed rooms, some inhabited by mannequins, which initially reflect all the comforts of suburban life, where the Bakelite radio is playing and the latest vacuum cleaner sits in the corner. There’s a garden with bright-green grass, a neat picket fence and a picnic of cherry pie. Domesticity slowly gives way to scenes of dubious work, where typewriters display CIA reports on dissidents, homosexuality and LSD. Clinical rooms feel like torture chambers.

It is as if we walk through the atmosphere of Curtis’s brilliantly edited film before we get the chance to sit down and watch it. What then follows is a montage of newsreel clips in which the bright colours and bubbly background music reflect American optimism and inventiveness, while the content concentrates largely on the effort to spread American influence around the world, whether through its culture or its clandestine efforts to destabilise other countries.

With the benefit of hindsight, elaborate connections are made between the CIA, Patrice Lumumba, chimpanzees, HIV, space travel, Doris Day and Rock Hudson. It’s enough to make one’s head spin, but unfortunately that’s not the end of it. There are still more corridors to be walked, or rather run, as the atmosphere turns Hitchcockian when a man with a chain saw starts to give chase, to Albarn’s sinister music. Frightening and memorable, yes — but also a bit silly.

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