Nathaniel Mellors, ICA

I will confess, the emotion which engulfed me when watching three films from Nathaniel Mellors’s Ourhouse series was not (initially) admiration but aggravation. The temporary plyboard cinemas of the ICA show episodes one, two and four of this pseudo-drama about the bohemian Maddox-Wilson family in their country house, whose communications start to go terribly wrong after a betracksuited man called The Object turns up, and with every passing minute I grew more frustrated even as I laughed.

The Object causes some sort of linguistic break when he arrives, gleaming in a white tracksuit like an angel descending from heaven, if heaven is JJB Sports. The already slightly bizarre family – hippy father Charles, his bimbo-ish second wife Annalise (amazing lips, Essex-girl voice), his adult children Truson and Faxson (think Fake-son), plus drunken uncle and Irish handyman – slowly ceases to speak in coherent sentences. Or rather, the sentences have grammar but take odd turns, with inappropriate nouns cropping up all the time, so although you know what they meant and should have said, they say something close but different. It is this which is so frustrating: just when you think something is going to make sense, it turns 90 degrees and ends up laughable, without them realising.

What we have here is a cross between Mrs Malaprop and John Baldessari. Baldessari, in an early strand of work, painted words describing a scene, instead of the scene itself, and Mellors is exploring the same territory but from a different perspective: whereas Baldessari wanted to convey accurately a scene in words, Mellors is giving us the right scene but the wrong words. Each in his own way is untying words from reality, signifier from signified. There may even be a direct Baldessari allusion when the handyman’s van is daubed with dirt which reads: “Here is a picture of a penis”. Only later do we see the phallus on the other side of the van, a wry riposte to Baldessari.

The role of the word is quite plain. The Object, in the second film, tears pages from a book and chews them up; in the fourth, he regurgitates them as juicy, saliva-soaked pulp. If this weren’t grotesque enough, Mellors has continued his sculptural work with an animatronic head (on display at the Hayward Gallery, where the second film is also part of the excellent British Art Show) which vomits foam into a bucket.

The animatronic quotient at the ICA is filled by two models of the head of Charles Maddox-Wilson, one flesh-tone, the other blue, and both joined by a long skein of ginger hair, both turning one way and the other, both yelling out obscenities (pictured above). I could not look at these, screeching and creaking, for more than 30 seconds before their trueness to life sent me fleeing.

The films manage to be touching too, by utilising old-fashioned conventions of drama: Truson is touching (yet absurd) when he thinks he has killed stuffed birds with the flash of his camera, and Charles gets angry as he tries to write a play. Instead of conveying these points about words and the world with an abstract film, which would almost be too easy, Mellors chooses to embed it into a narrative which gives a human quality to the debate.

A final word on the numbering of the series. As a gallerina explained, with a suitable degree of abashment, episode three has not yet been produced because it involves a dream sequence with high production values, and Mellors hasn’t got the funding for this yet, or for parts five and six. As much as the work unsettled me, it would be a great shame if arts cuts deprive us of the full breadth of Mellors’s hilarious, demanding vision.

• Nathaniel Mellors: Ourhouse at the ICA runs until 15 May