MOVIE REVIEW: The Girl On the Third Floor

If The Girl On the Third Floor wanted to be ranked among some of the best left-of-center content on Netflix, it should have gotten a better director. If it had less ideas and spent more time elaborating on any of them instead of feeling like it needed to constantly compromise logic for shock value, it could have been any number of decent paranormal thrillers. One thing the version we ended up getting is not is a complete movie.

This movie does several things well before abandoning them and moving onto something else. Maybe these moments were just emulated from movies the director liked, but they’re interesting moments visually. Whoever was responsible for making this movie look good, meaning shot well, could easily be the cinematographer on one of those new elegant horror works that are winning all the awards. I think that’s what they were trying to do here, and it’s hard to tell who to blame for why they weren’t able to.

Make-up and costume design are also done very well here, but the best effects are saved until the end of the movie as part of a twist that is hinted at but not actually connected to the larger narrative. Therefore it isn’t earned. It’s a shame really. As stated earlier, if the person in charge of stringing these elements together had a more refined vision then this movie could have been something great.

There are some cool moments that touch on what appears to be the film’s main theme of toxic masculinity. The protagonist doesn’t ask for help because he’s too proud, and the antagonist seems to at first be sympathetic, only going after him because of his disdainful behavior. This is of course completely negated when she kills everybody who enters the house, even the protagonist’s pregnant wife who it was implied early in the film she was first trying to help by getting her abusive husband out of her hair.

Character motivations are either unclear or nonexistent. The Black guy dies first. Just about everything about this movie is embarrassing. Again, there are only moments of creative camerawork and other visual tricks, and they all seem like they belong in separate movies.

One saving grace of The Girl On the Third Floor is that its disjointed feel and ridiculous twists could lend itself well to meme culture, which shouldn’t be seen as a bad thing. In the late 00’s, there were a handful of bad or just odd 80’s movies like Troll 2 and Phantasmagoria that were given a second life on the Internet due to Netflix. The difference here might be that there’s so much more content not just on Netflix but everywhere that it’s easy to just forget this movie and movie onto the next.

The bottom line is that if you have Netflix, it’s not a huge time commitment to check the movie out for yourself and make your own judgement. CM Punk’s performance in the lead role is pretty great. The visual appeal, again, is high at several points. It’s really just the story that is ridiculous here, but that’s a big hit when you’re working in a narrative format.

The Girl On The Third Floor is streaming on Netflix now and stars CM Punk in his cinematic debut, Trieste Kelly Dunn and Tonya Kay.