Girl on the Third Floor

2019

TV-MA

Hey everyone. With the world in a frenzy and no sports on TV, a lot of you are probably looking for TV shows and movies to watch. I’m here with another movie review and this time I will be reviewing the 2019 horror film, Girl on the Third Floor. To be fair, I’m not a huge fan of the horror genre, but if it has the right plot and context, I can get behind it. To be honest, the biggest thing that drew me to this film was the leading actor, Phil Brooks, who happens to be a famous ex-WWE wrestler by the name of CM Punk. I didn’t really know a lot about the film prior to knowing that he was in the film, but I did a little research and decided to watch it.

Girl on the Third Floor revolves around Don Koch (Phil Brooks aka CM Punk) and his pregnant wife Liz (Trieste Kelly Dunn). After having a bad run in life to this point, the couple decided to start over and move to the suburbs in Chicago, but the house that they buy is a dilapidated house that requires a lot of attention, we later find out that it was an old brothel. Don spends all of his time repairing the house, while Liz stays away maintaining the household financially. Don runs into a lot of issues that seem to pile up as the movie progresses and becomes overwhelmed. He is working day and night at the house and at every turn, finds creepy things about the house, such as a balcony in the attic, children’s artwork in the attic, strange substances oozing from the walls, and even marbles randomly rolling across the floor in a specific pattern.

Don is welcomed by the local pastor, Ellie (Karen Woditsch), and warns Don of the eerie things surrounding the house, but Don continues to repair the house. Later in the night, he is greeted by a neighbor that seemingly came from nowhere. We later find out her name is Sarah Yates (Sarah Brooks), but after a flirtatious conversation, Don proceeds to cheat on his wife with Sarah. As problems continue to pile up with the renovation, Don asks his friend Milo (Travis Delgado) to help him repair the home. As they work together to rebuild the house, Sarah shows up to the house, but Don tells her to leave and that she isn’t welcomed to the house anymore. Milo is deeply concerned and Don tells him what went on between the two. Don briefly left the house and Milo stayed. Milo is then confronted by Sarah in the basement. Here is where the story really takes a turn. They spend the rest of the movie trying to fight off the living being(s) inside the house that feed off of weak personal morals and dysfunction.

This film first aired at the South by Southwest Film Festival in March of 2019 and was later released to limited theaters in October of the same year. The movie is now on Blu-Ray and DVD and was released on Netflix just 2 or 3 weeks ago. After finding out that CM Punk was in the movie I was interested, but it started getting positive reviews, so I wanted to take a look at it. My take on the film is that it is a modern film with a classic old-school horror feel and I feel like it was a good combo.

Overall, I liked it. I don’t watch enough horror films to really get a great grasp of what is good or bad, but I know what I like and what I look for in a horror film. If you take a trip to IMDb, you will find that this movie has a rating of 4.7/10. Take it from me, it wasn’t that bad. Was it the best horror film I have ever seen? No, but it was far from the worst. As I read reviews from IMDb, I noticed a lot of people saying that they were disinterested from the get-go and I will say, it took a while to find pertinent information involving characters, but you can’t appreciate and digest a film watching only 15-20 minutes of it, and I feel like a lot of the reviews on IMDb did just that. Rotten Tomatoes has it currently at 81%, but with an audience score of 25%, so this tells me that non-critics were turned off by the fact that they didn’t know a great deal of information early on, so they didn’t enjoy it.

If you are wondering, I would recommend Girl on the Third Floor, but be cautious if you start seeing marbles rolling across the floor.

GRADE: 3.6/5

Yacs

Movie Review: Girl on the Third Floor