It’s great when architecture is a featured part of a motion picture, setting the tone for things like “Parasite” or “Columbus” or “The Matrix.” It’s central, too, to the indie film “Mid-Century,” about an architect and his wife who rent out a mid-century home for the weekend.
Not only is the sleek glass residence a prime example of the work of a famed period architect, the fictional Frederick Banner, it also turns out to be his onetime home. Still, Banner remains a mysterious, foreboding figure, who is said to have dabbled in the occult (as did LeCorbusier) or mixed up in a string of murders (as was Frank Lloyd Wright, thought it was a worker who slaughtered his mistress and six others Wright’s home, Taliesin, in Wisconsin).
Banner, seen in flashbacks, is a creepy presence who covets the wives who move into his modern homes, killing the husbands and eventually the wives.
It’s a tradition that continues through his son Eldredge, who rents out the home weekends and returns at inopportune times to unsettle people.
The ghosts of past victims are still around in their period hairstyles and urge something be done about this lingering evil. It’s up to the weekend guest to try something, though it involves so much shape-shifting, it becomes almost as weird as the cultish satanist rituals that come near the climax.
“Mid-Century” turns into kind of a mess that gets more and more hard to follow. Unlike the trademark lines and short sharp lines of the mid-century design, this yarn only becomes fuzzy.
The actor Stephen Lang does little more than smile ominously and flash a knife when he pops up as the menacing architect Banner. Seen even less is his grizzled mentor, played Bruce Dern. Seen in just two scenes, Dern nonetheless sometimes gets top billing here.
Most of the action revolves around Shane West as the renter trying to solve the mystery. Chelsea Gilligan does a stylish turn as his wife, a doctor who is getting run down by pandemic deaths and mauling bosses, and is considering a new job in the modernist California town. Sarah Hay is in a thankless role as a victim/ghost.
“Mid-Century” is the first feature screenplay for Mike Stern, who also takes on the role as the architect’s goofy son, who is expected to keep up the family tradition of murder.
Director Sonja O’Hara knows how to best frame the handsome homes used (the one they shot was in Orange, Calif) but she has a tendency to cut to confusing close-ups of odd objects or angles that interrupt the flow of a scene.
Stern, in a statement, calls the film in part “a social commentary on Trumpism,” which doesn’t come through at all, even though an Orange King is mentioned. He also calls it “a tongue-in-cheek satire and a haunted house thriller that goes off the rails — much like our country has in the 21st century.”
Again, the satire doesn’t come through. But there’s no doubt about it’s going off the rails.
“Mid-Century” is available for streaming on Peacock Premium, Fubu and Direct TV, Prime Video and Roku, or for rent from Apple TV, Prime Video or YouTube.