Thoroughly unsettling, never simplistic: Mike Nelson – Extinction Beckons, at the Hayward Gallery, reviewed

You enter through the gift shop. Mike Nelson has turned the Hayward Gallery upside down and back to front for his survey exhibition, Extinction Beckons. ‘It’s been a very intensive four weeks,’ says an assistant putting the finishing touches to the multi-room installation ‘The Deliverance and The Patience’ (2001) when I visit two days before the opening.

Having the place to myself feels like having sole occupancy of the haunted house at the fair. This is less of a house, though, more a warren of passages and poky rooms bearing unsettling signs of previous habitation. Can the Hayward’s functional spaces really feel this spooky? Lit by one of Nelson’s signature red lights, even the green sign reading ‘FIRE EXIT’ makes me nervous. Nelson likes red bulbs and the glow they cast, suggestive of the embers of civilisation.

There are a lot of fire doors. There are a lot of doors full stop, with creaking hinges – no WD-40 in Nelson’s tool bag – and many choices confronting the curious Alice who dares to plunge down this rabbit hole. Once through an empty reception area with a whirring fan on an unmanned desk, then an airless room with a camp bed and sleeping bags, you face your first pair of exits. Sharp right or right? Sharp right leads into another airless room with scraps of crumpled fabric and a sewing-machine table with the name ‘AHMED’ gouged out of its Formica surface; right leads down a corridor to a purple-walled hippie shrine with a Garuda carving, Chinese Buddha and skull. Further on, you stumble on a red-walled gambling den with a fringed canopy light illuminating a toy roulette wheel. The narrow passages form random links between subcultures coexisting without connecting behind spring-hinge doors.