Girl On The Third Floor is a 2019 horror film about a man who tries to renovate a rundown house, only to learn that it has other plans.
Don Koch (Phil Brooks) has bought himself a new (old) house, a quint-looking mansion type in need of some fixing up. He’s hoping to get it in shape for his pregnant wife Liz (Trieste Kelly Dunn) and their growing family. From the start however, there are signs things aren’t going to be easy. The rooms are cluttered and dusty; there’s a used condom on the floor; oh and one wall is oozing black goo. Then the outlets offer some ick of their own. It only gets worse from there. Ellie (Karen Woditsch), the pastor next door, a long time resident of the town, has some sage warnings for her new neighbor, as does the owner (Marshall Bean) of the local bowling alley and pub, but Don sticks with it and soon enough finds that he’s bought himself a real nightmare, in more ways than one.
This isn’t exactly original stuff, and no doubt director Travis Stevens, in his feature length directorial debut, knows that, packing his movie with a flurry of the usual suspects in the haunted house genre. That’s not bad of course. Things work in movies like this because the right moving parts do their job. Girl on the Third Floor is a movie with all those right parts and thanks to some solid direction, a taste for the bizarre with tongue in cheek, it clicks along with a sort of competent aptitude for want it wants to deliver.
Brooks, better known as wrestler C.M. Punk, takes to the frenzy well enough, even with the gaps in logic and story that for instance see every pipe in the house eject all kinds of horrific gunk, leaving him literally covered in goop, though in the next scene clean and all washed up. These things aren’t important in such a story, so the movie glosses over it, instead getting right to the house itself, when Don meets Sarah (Sarah Brooks), an attractive young woman with a serious flirty side who shows up and quickly seduces the already horny husband. You just know she’s bad news.
The good thing in this is how Stevens does know the playground he’s romping around in while avoiding many of the usual traps, with a steady but properly escalating level of horror hijinks that side step the typical jumpscares. It doesn’t always embrace its premise quite as fully as it feels ready to do, the scale small enough to keep it interesting but not quite unsettling or dramatic enough to make it effective. The movie tosses in some curious themes of sexual orientation and feminism along with plenty of pressure on keeping a moral line in life, but despite some good performances and high quality production values – especially in the third act – Girl on the Third Floor doesn’t keep its secrets all that well hidden, leaving this a see-through horror that may satisfy, and maybe proof that C.M. Punk has more to offer outside the ring.