GIRL ON THE THIRD FLOOR (2019)

Studio:      Dark Sky Films
Director:    Travis Stevens
Writer:      Travis Stevens
Producer:  Nicola Goelzhaeuser, Giles Edwards, Greg Newman
Stars:     Phil Brooks, Trieste Kelly Dunn, Sarah Brooks, Elissa Dowling, Karen Woditsch, Travis Delgado, Marshall Bean, Anish Jethmalani, Bishop Stevens, Tonya Kay

Review Score:

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Summary: 

While renovating a haunted house, ghosts of the women who died there expose a selfish family man for who he really is.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Accompanied by his dog Cooper, disgraced stockbroker Don Koch begins renovating a suburban Chicago home in advance of his pregnant wife Liz moving in with him. Bizarre fluids leak from pipes and outlets. Marbles continually appear in odd places. Don finds a dress and old wig behind one of the strangely rotten walls he tears down and patches over.

Don meets his new neighbor Ellie Mueller, a progressive pastor who lives in a Protestant church across the street. Don also meets bartender Geary McCabe at a local tavern, despite assuring Liz he would stop drinking. Geary warns that Don’s house has a history of being unkind to men.

Don meets Sarah Yates outside the house. Don invites Sarah in for a beer. Sarah seduces Don and the two of them have sex.

After Sarah leaves, the bedroom ceiling caves in. Don discovers a third floor attic overhead that he didn’t know was there. Don sees what looks like a balcony railing for people to look down into the bedroom.

Sarah returns the next night. Don explains that he cannot continue their affair. Sarah claims to understand. Later that evening, Don has a sex dream where Liz transforms into Sarah.

Don’s friend Milo Stone comes to the house for the weekend to help with repairs. Don takes Milo to the bar where Geary repeats that Don’s house was once a notorious brothel.

Don wakes the next morning to discover Sarah in the kitchen posing as his assistant. Don angrily kicks Sarah out of the house. The incident forces Don to tell Milo about having sex with Sarah. Milo chides Don for cheating on Liz again. Don cools off by going to the hardware store.

Left alone, Milo follows a rolling marble into the basement. Sarah brutally beats Milo with a hammer. A ghoulish apparition known as ‘The Nymph,’ who is the adult ghost of a murdered girl named Sadie, helps Sarah finish killing Milo.

Don returns home to find Milo missing. However, Don receives a text from Milo’s phone assuring him everything is okay.

While FaceTiming over the phone, Liz sees Sarah flash behind Don. Don doesn’t find anyone when he searches the house, but he does discover the lock broken on the backdoor.

Sarah emerges from inside a wall to kill Cooper. Don finds mutilated dog parts tumbling inside the laundry room dryer. Don calls the police, but Patrolman Weaver claims he doesn’t have enough evidence or information to track down Sarah.

Sarah confronts Don. Frustrated, Don murders Sarah with a wrench. Don begins walling up Sarah’s body in the basement when a call from Liz interrupts him. Liz tells Don she received a message from Milo saying they need to talk. When he returns to the basement, Don finds Sarah’s body missing.

Don follows an apparition to the third floor. In the attic, Don discovers a hidden room littered with marbles where a child, Sadie, drew images of a man in a raven mask holding her hand.

Don sees the apparition inside another wall. Don tears at a wall he fixed and discovers a giant beating heart as well as Milo’s body. The house begins bleeding in various places.

The Nymph emerges as paranormal activity takes over the house. A marble rolls inside Don’s skin. Don mutilates his flesh with a blade while attempting to remove the marble. The Nymph releases more marbles that roll toward Don.

Liz arrives. She finds a newspaper from 1909 with an article about a woman who went missing when the house was a brothel.

Sarah suddenly startles Liz. Sarah vanishes when Ellie Mueller comes to the door. Ellie asks to speak with Liz outside where she cryptically warns that the house has a history of bringing out the worst in people.

After pulling a large lock of hair from a sink drain, Liz sees an eye staring back at her. Frightened because she cannot find Don, Liz consults Ellie. Liz confides that Don cheated on her and defrauded his clients, but the new home was supposed to be their second chance. Ellie advises Liz to get far away from the house while warning that it corrupts men.

Liz finds men in suits all over the house when she returns. The Nymph instructs Liz to go upstairs where Liz sees the men gathering around the attic railing. In the bedroom below, Sarah does a striptease before the man in the raven mask erotically whips her for the spectators.

Liz sees Sadie drawing on a wall in the corner. The man in the raven mask comes over and takes a bag of marbles from the girl.

Everyone vanishes. Sarah explains that the masked man molested Sadie for months before murdering her and dumping her body on train tracks. The man then killed Sarah, but her body never left the house and no one ever questioned her disappearance.

Sarah lunges at Liz with a blade. Liz retreats to the bedroom where Don crawls out of a closet covered with bloody wounds. Don claims he cannot leave the house because of what he did, but asks for another chance to make things right between them. Liz refuses to listen. Don cuts his face and tears off his skin, revealing Sarah underneath.

Liz flees. The Nymph crawls out of a wall. Liz beats her to death. Sarah kneels over The Nymph’s body as Liz leaves.

Liz finds Ellie on the porch. Liz asks why Ellie never directly told her what the house was. Ellie admits she watches the house from her church, but explains she cannot direct anyone’s actions since the house tests a person’s individual choices.

Liz recovers Sarah’s skeleton from inside a wall. Liz and Ellie bury Sarah’s remains.

Six Months Later – Liz lives in the house with her newborn baby. Marbles drop into the baby’s crib from an overhead vent. Don appears in the ceiling behind the vent.

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Review:

From what I know of his in-ring alter ego as ‘C.M. Punk,’ and from what he shows in his feature film debut as an actor, Phil Brooks’ persona works well for playing Don Koch. The role requires seeing him as alternately endearing, annoying, often clueless, and occasionally cunning. Brooks turns on and turns off these heel/babyface traits as easily as blinking his eyes. As Don, Brooks can be friendly, fumbling, or fearsome. Even with the impression of a tattooed wrestler standing front and center, it’s not out of the question to accept Brooks as a “bad boy” of investment banking whose alpha male arrogance exposed him as an unfaithful husband and greedy embezzler. This is definitely a guy good at getting in over his head and then forcibly fighting his way out with frustrated fists.

Don’s second chance comes courtesy of a suburban Illinois fixer-upper. While his pregnant wife waits back in the city, Don plays DIY handyman by turning a 100-year-old house into a fresh start home. He might need more help than Home Depot and YouTube can provide however. The former brothel’s weirdly rotting walls and outlets leaking goo are only the tip of a troubling iceberg. The apparently haunted house also comes with disturbing nightmares, shadowy apparitions, and randomly rolling marbles.

What would a “welcome to the neighborhood” sequence be without a coterie of locals introducing themselves individually? Cluttering up an essentially one-man show with characters of debatable narrative value, “Girl on the Third Floor” puts several stones in its shoe that pain the first third’s pace.

An attorney stops by for a brief moment to drop off some papers while dropping exposition about Don avoiding prison for defrauding his clients. A bartender serves a similar purpose, although he earns a second scene since he contributes two crumbs of backstory. The revelation about Don’s drinking does redundant work since the cooler of beers in his kitchen and suspicious wife on the phone already did that job. Same with the bartender’s second scene where he repeats what he already said about the house’s history, but for the benefit of Don’s buddy who arrives to bump up the body count – I mean, help Don with repairs.

A progressive pastor who lives across the street throws her scarf on the rack too. She doesn’t matter much until further into the film. For now, she fills the function of a person more skilled at intermittently raising ominous eyebrows than dealing in straightforward facts. You know her type. Although the conclusion lets her off the hook with a vague explanation, ‘Old Lady Exposition’ could end the movie at the 10-minute mark if she’d simply stop speaking in fortune cookie riddles.

Slow starts are par for the course with suspense-building thrillers. “Girl on the Third Floor” chugs a little harder than usual though, as it stunts initial speed with more scenes than necessary for establishing an atmosphere of mundane normalcy. When not entertaining inconsequential visitors, Don jogs with his dog, puts up drywall, and takes time out to peruse porn on his phone. Paranormal activity amps up eventually, but “Girl on the Third Floor” takes casually curved detours to get there.

Don’s road to reclaiming his life hits its own detour when he meets Sarah. Part specter, part seductress, Sarah symbolizes every vice Don has ever indulged in. He promised to change, but Don reasons his hard work should be rewarded with a relapse, revealing a zebra with stripes that never truly vanished.

Through Sarah, “Girl on the Third Floor” temporarily transitions from haunted house horror to “girlfriend from Hell” thriller. For Don, his tryst was one night of “don’t tell anyone” fun. For Sarah, it’s a reason to return whether Don wants her around or not. And he definitely does not. But it takes a collapsed ceiling revealing a secret attic for Don to discover Sarah is only one part of a bigger mystery involving a disfigured hag, two unsolved murders, and an impossibly large beating heart hidden behind a warped wall.

Once “Girl on the Third Floor” trades its first act foundation of cinematic convention for a second act of thematic reflection, shed skin reveals bones of infinitely more intrigue. Much like the house, the story’s skeleton reconstitutes with stronger limbs of sinister intent. Lighter tones recede so darker moods can occupy that space instead. By tearing down Don figuratively and literally through an unsubtle metaphor mirrored in the house, the film finally finds a slice of weirdly wicked chills with a bizarrely ferocious bite.

As director Travis Stevens put it, Don isn’t corrupted by the house so much as he is exposed by it. Traditional strokes of body horror, mental madness, and ghost story ghoulishness are pigments in a larger character portrait condemning cowardice, selfishness, and abusive authority.

For good and for bad, subtext doesn’t consistently poke through plotting. That’s convenient for anyone averse to commentary mixing with entertainment. Yet this also lessens the film’s intended impact when surprising sights of splatter mute intangible material underneath.

I’ve seen other coverage calling “Girl on the Third Floor” funny, but I don’t see where this hard humor supposedly comes from. Unless Phil Brooks doing an occasional pratfall after being unexpectedly sprayed with gunk counts as comedy, anyone expecting slide whistles and horn honks will have a tough time finding a laugh.

I don’t understand criticisms of the last act either, as that is where “Girl on the Third Floor” meets its potential as a tip-top thriller. After such slow going to get out of its setup stage, the movie at last cuts the brake lines with visceral viciousness you can’t turn away from. Gruesome milieus not normally depicted in similar films come with unsettling connotations aligned with the fiction’s final revelations. The movie would be better served by spreading its eeriness evenly across an imbalanced runtime instead of exclusively reserving it for an energetic ending. Yet even at only 75% effectiveness in terms of tone and themes, polished styling in cinematography, performances, and set design pulls together a competent haunter with more substance than most.

Review Score: 65

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