Mark Reviews Movies: MID-CENTURY

Mid-Century, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 16, 2022

The ghosts of Mid-Century mean something, and it's too bad that Mike Stern's screenplay seems to forget or, at least, starts to overlook that fact. This begins as a pretty blatant story about sexism and misogyny carrying on through the generations, and then, it becomes a bland mystery, a generic scare fest, and a mess of some convoluted rules and mythology of the supernatural. At some point, Stern and director Sonja O'Hara decide the mechanics of this story are more important than what exists beneath them.

Those mechanics veer from the routine to the nearly inexplicable—so much so that even the movie seems to struggle to make sense of what its characters are doing or have just accomplished. The whole starts more in the routine vein, with a prologue set in the early 1960s. A man and his wife have just moved into a new house, built by famous architect Frederick Banner (Stephen Lang). By the end, the husband is dead, hanging from the rafters, while the wife is accosted by the architect, who clearly has some sinister intentions in mind. Under those circumstances, that Banner offers up some demeaning notions to the husband about a woman's "proper" place in the home and society comes across as a relatively minor flaw in his ways and thinking.

In the modern day (The story directly references the COVID-19 pandemic in a way that's initially intriguing but, like so many of the interesting ideas here, quickly falls by the wayside), married couple Tom Levin (Shane West) and Alice Dodgeson (Chelsea Gilligan) have rented a house in the same neighborhood from the prologue for the weekend. He is also an architect, currently rushing to complete a job he has neglected.

She is a doctor, looking to take a job at a local hospital. Her current boss is a routine sexual harasser, and Alice wants away from that situation. Stern ends up putting Alice on the sidelines for most of the story. That makes the early attention to her experiences feel a bit disingenuous in the long run—especially when a similar situation is raised, only to be dismissed by the plot's hurry to get to back to the scares and the hasty climax (although Alice, oddly, is in no hurry—even making a stop in the hot tub—to follow through on the fear her husband is in danger).

Tom is the central figure here—and a pretty passive and dull one that. Left alone for the night to work on his project while Alice takes a shift at the hospital, he soon discovers that this house wasn't just designed by Frederick. It was the famed architect's actual house.

Out of curiosity and admiration, Tom starts looking into the house and the man, with the help of his assistant (played by Emmy Perry), with whom he's having an affair and whose existence as a complication to everything is dispatched with sudden violence. He also, unexpectedly, gets a bit of help from Marie (Sarah Hay), the ghost of one of Frederick's many wives, who shows our investigating hero what we already know: Frederick was a sexual creep and a serial murderer. Meanwhile, another killer is getting rid of people who visit or find out about the house and appearing in shadow in the backdrop as Tom continues to wander and read his way toward the truth.

All of that is revealed through flashbacks to Frederick and his controlling/murderous ways, film of and books written by the architect's spiritual advisor on the occult Emil Larson (Bruce Dern), and a cop (played by Annapurna Sriram) who starts to connect the pieces of the killings and the house's current owner. The owner's identity, his connection to this story, and what he does to Tom, of course, probably shouldn't be detailed here.

For all of the potential weight that might come from the notion of Frederick's sexist philosophy being passed down and continued by at least one shadowy figure, though, Stern (who also plays a major role here), mostly sees it on a superficial level. It exists here as a means of creating cheap scares, illogical scenes of suspense (Tom doesn't call for help after falling into a seemingly random hole, for reasons that only make sense when we realize the screenplay is delaying a vital detail), and a supernatural mythology that appears to be made up as the plot requires.

O'Hara, along with cinematographer Antonio Cisneros, does generate an eerie atmosphere in Mid-Century, both in the shadows of the modern-day story and the deceptively nostalgic glow of the flashbacks. It's all in service of a story that shows some thematic promise but becomes entirely invested in a bunch of half-formed gimmicks.

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