Gold is making a comeback on screen. Last week, Spike Lee released his Netflix movie Da 5 Bloods, about African-American veterans searching for gold in the jungles of Vietnam. This week, it’s the BBC’s turn with their six-part adaptation of The Luminaries, a period detective drama set in New Zealand during the Gold Rush.

But whereas Lee bathes his fiction in uncomfortable facts, writer Eleanor Catton (adapting her own book) and director Claire McCarthy (Ophelia) plunge into frustrating superstition with uncomfortable severity.

The Luminaries pulses with astrological influence. The characters are pushed by shapely constellations and planetary orbits, which only feel intrusive to an already interesting premise. But the mysticism, ultimately, doesn’t bring this series down – the big issue is: it’s galactically confusing.

Anna Wetherell (Eve Hewson) with Emery Staines (Himesh Patel) Credit: BBC/The Luminaries Production Ltd 2018

It’s 1866, and there’s been a murder near Dunedin on the South Island. The sex worker Anna Wetherell (Eve Hewson) is arrested, but has no memory of why she was there at the scene of the crime. The harsh and prejudicial Gaoler George Shepard (Callan Mulvey), wielding a villainous ’tache, attempts to discipher what happened.

Continuously hopping between the present and nine months in the past, the series unravels the story of Anna and the aspiring prospector Emery Staines (Himesh Patel). They both arrive into Dunedin by boat, aspiring to make new lives for themselves from the new wealth of the country.

Catton’s doorstop of a novel bursts with characters and allows them to breathe in 850 pages of space. But in the series, most of them suffocate – struggling for any breath of dialogue. Only the main players are given adequate entrances: the optimistic Anna, the romantic Emery, the gruff ex-con Francis Carver (Marton Csokas), the spiritually deceptive Lydia Wells (Eva Green) and her drunken but ambitious husband Crosbie (Ewen Leslie).

The rest drift in and out, their distinctive names (‘Dick Mannering’, ‘Walter Moody’, ‘Alistair Lauderback’) thankfully fixing in the mind as much as their unique appearances. Although there are just too many players to deal with, further confusing the impenetrable plot, they are memorable at least. Catton and McCarthy have Dickensian talents in painting characters.

Lydia Wells (Eva Green) showing Anna her astrology chart. Credit: BBC/The Luminaries Production Ltd 2018/Kirsty Griffin

The plot soon squirms into a befuddling vortex of overflowing turns and magical resolutions. As such, the series devolves from an intriguing idea – a murder-mystery set in a conservative, greedy world scrabbling for gold – into a show that resembles a lamentably basic supernatural drama.

Prepare to hear nauseating phrases like ‘séance’, ‘astral twin’ and ‘cosmic fingerprint’ as well as heavy descriptions of orbital placements. Happily, their witchy dictator Lydia Wells has a dark and intriguing presence as the proprietor of the House of Many Wishes, hosting many surreal parties and revelling as the show’s holistically deceptive nemesis.

The relationship between Anna and Emery, despite being predicated on nonsense, also has a certain appealing chemistry – especially as both keep missing each other and fall into exhaustively difficult situations. Their journeys lead them to Hokitika, where so much gold is waiting to be plundered. But as they wade deeper into overloaded fantasy, the series adopts a spiritual silliness that’s impossible to take seriously.

Despite having the traits of a revisionist Western, resembling Robert Altman’s muddy, opium-scented drama McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Luminaries is an endless maze with a disappointing, inaccessible centre.

The Luminaries airs on Sunday 21 June at 9pm on BBC One