Annette Messager at the Hayward

It is not easy to like Annette Messager's exhibion at the Hayward, so intent is it on spooking you. It is equally hard to see what has moved the celebrated French artist to produce such ghoulish pieces of anguish. But it's worth trawling your way through all this dread, for it radiates both discomfort and comfort in a fascinating, improbable way.

An accepted reading of Messager's work, underpinned by interviews with the artist (some of them are helpfully posted next to works here), suggests a fascination with radical feminist issues. But it ultimately comes across as the contorted imagination of a badly scarred person, lacking as it is in the slightest sense of warmth and humanity.

There is nothing here, among the inflated pieces of plastic organs, charcoal-drawings of tortured, crucified women, birds (some of them real) nailed to wooden boards, that will move you to empathy. Most disturbingly, there are no faces at all among the endless human drawings, only ears, fingers, breasts, bums, palms, and the odd head from behind. The discomfort is intensified by the fact that most of Messager's work has an eerily childish quality about it: the drawings, the dead birds dressed up in tiny clothes, the thin, spiked poles. They are all the more nightmarish for it.

The worst bit is a series of photographs of children with their eyes scratched out. Messager says she wanted to make the point that not all women want to have kids - but it's revolting more than anything else, pointlessly so. And inevitably, some of the pieces go way overboard. A hung skeleton-torso with a huge nose, casting its long shadow on the wall as a complicated machinery moves it from side to side, is liable to strike you as quite silly. The vast room of inflated body parts, with huge penises and livers nodding towards each other, is the worst stereotype of modern art.

And yet, somehow it works. The drawings in particular have a comforting feel about them that lingers even among all this horror. A collection of postcards, symbolising happiness and drawn in an exaggerated fashion, can even make you smile as you notice patterns in what seems to constitute nice thoughts for the artist: dancing African women, evening beaches, fairytale castles up the sky. Perhaps she drew those after a happier night of sleep.

Annette Messager: The Messenger
Opens 4 March until 25 March at the Hayward, Southbank Centre