[Review] Girl on the Third Floor is a Goopy Good Time

When my parents retired, they bought an old Victorian house and began renovating it. It remains a passion project for them and they love trying to bring it back to its original glory, breathing life back into its old bones. Like all good Victorian homes should be, they believe it’s haunted. But instead of things going bump in the night, the ghosts seem to be more friendly. Phantom smells of food wafting up from the kitchen and a warm presence at night seems to suggest how content they are with their new housemates.

The same cannot be said for the house on Saw and Circle in Travis Stevens’ directorial debut Girl on the Third Floor. For instance, I don’t remember my parents saying that the house leaked blood, fecal matter or semen. I guess all houses are different…but I’m just sayin’ that this house has seen some shit. 

No pun intended.

Don Koch (C.M. Punk/Phil Brooks) and his wife Liz (Trieste Kelly Dunn) purchased the house to start fresh after Don got into some trouble at his firm. It’s not stated immediately what happened, but it involves the Feds and Don’s attorney (Anish Jethmalani) shows up with papers to sign, asking, “How’s a guy like you plan to survive out here? Can’t imagine there’s much of a nightlife.” The way he says this drips with sarcasm and very pointedly hints at the life Don is trying to escape. Don’s rowdy previous life is also explored in video chats with Liz, who spies beer bottles on the mantle and questions him. He tells her its leftover clutter and to not be paranoid. “I trust you,” she replies.

But does she? Or, rather…should she? Don seems to enjoy keeping secrets, like just how much of a mess the house really is. For example, he blanches at a pink-painted room that would just be garishly innocuous if not for the dark, black and dripping smudge in the middle of one of the pink walls. As Don touches it, his fingers pierce the blackness as if its flesh and it comes away black and chunky in his hands.

If he keeps that secret, he definitely doesn’t tell her about Sarah (Sarah Brooks), who shows up with booze, weed and full of cool seduction. Her hand lingers on Don’s nice, firm, tattooed body; her fingers dancing across his shoulders and chest. It escalates into a night of passion. After “the mistake,” as he calls it, he pushes her aside and gets frustrated when Sarah, like most secrets, won’t go away.

But she’s just one of the mysteries kicking around the creaky house in Girl on the Third Floor. Like any good ghost story, the clues slowly start to resurface the more Don digs around. Hints come in the form of an old wig, purchased from Eros Imports in 1909, for example, that he finds stuffed behind the drywall, amid old newspapers. Then there’s the used condom plopped in the middle of a disgusting amount of what I can only assume is semen, pooled in an upstairs room.

But it’s also in the people. Like the way the bartender at a local bowling alley asks what, at first, seems like a bigoted question, “Are you queer?” before pivoting to a statement full of hidden meaning: “That house is bad news for straight men…”. Or the way the female pastor (Karen Woditsch) across the street won’t enter the house and seems to know more of its history than she lets on. And As Don digs into the house in ways both literal and figurative, he starts to learn that some secrets can’t be given a fresh coat of paint and ignored. 

I was unfamiliar with former wrestler CM Punk before this movie and, considering so much of the movie is simply him trying to renovate the house while dealing with supernatural forces, I was a bit nervous. Girl on the Third Floor is almost a one man show for most of the movie, with an assist from his dog Cooper (played to amusing perfection by Ryker). But he manages to pull it off, mostly through his onscreen charisma.

He commands the screen, exuding the kind of masculinity and sexuality that is both effortlessly charming and subtly toxic. The camera loves his body and, if you’ll forgive a bit of editorializing, he fills out a pair of briefs very nicely. His eyes, though, are his best feature; expressive in a way that reminded me of Bruce Campbell’s Ash. I bring up his body because in a lot of ways Girl on the Third Floor is a story about bodies, human or otherwise.

The house is ruefully personified as “a bitch” by the pastor. It’s just another body to be used and when Don starts ripping chunks of the walls away, it comes off like flesh, its insides filled with gore and sinew. The house becomes a metaphor for the historical atrocities committed against the women (and their bodies) inside it. “All men really love is the power you give them,” a character says at one point and it’s true of the way Don inhabits the world. His affable smile, nice body and charming personality has simply carried him along, through past fuck-ups and legal problems.

So it’s only appropriate that when the house strikes back, it’s through bodily fluids and attacks on Don’s own masculine body. And it’s here where the practical effects come to gooey, goopy life. As the attacks ratchet up in intensity and intent, a few sequences left me cringing. It’s obvious the team had to work within indie budget expectations, but what they managed to wring out works perfectly. I do wish that, as it rounded the third act, they were able to go bigger with the amount of goo and larger effects, but that’s a small complaint.

What I loved best about Travis Stevens’ script is that it managed to give agency to Liz. For most of the run time, she’s relegated to FaceTime calls and she provides extra pressure and drama, with the baby on the way and the way she’s quick to point out the misbegotten bottles of alcohol strewn about. But Stevens managed to invert expectations by giving her a bigger, juicier role than you’d expect. The way he frames her story elevates the narrative beyond your typical haunted house and I loved the places it went as it careened into the third act.

So come for the goop, which copiously oozes, explodes and drips, and the fantastic practical effects. But stay for the surprisingly feminist script that has a lot to say about toxicity. It’s a great debut and I hope it’s just the start of Travis’s directorial career.