A little renovation is all she needs.
The Girl on the Third Floor is a 2019 horror movie by Travis Stevens, written by Stevens, Paul Johnstone and Ben Parker, and starring CM Punk, Trieste Kelly Dunn and Tonya Kay.It tells the story of husband Don Koch (played by Punk) who attempts to renovate a new home for his heavily pregnant wife (played by Kelly). However, Don soon starts losing control of his vices while away from his wife, and at the same time, the house around him starts to feel less and less like home.
The movie contains examples of:
- Amoral Attorney: It's implied and later outright stated that Don, an ex-lawyer, is using money from countless defrauded clients.
- Artifact of Doom: Something bad happening is always heralded by a marble rolling downstairs from the third floor. When Don finally agitates the house beyond its patience, the Nymph wakes up. When she comes after him, the first marble invades his body through a foot wound he got earlier, crawling under his skin. He tries to cut it out with a knife, leading him to sever his own jugular when it proceeds to roll up into his neck. Several marbles drop down from her hands afterward, and it's implied they're involved in the assimilation process.
- Asshole Victim: Don Koch is a truly miserable excuse for a husband, happily cheating on his wife, who is heavily pregnant with his child, mere days after being out of her sight, and instead of being the least bit guilty about it, he insists to his dog that he earned it, lies about it to his best friend, and only attempts to rebuff the side chick when her presence threatens the secrecy of the affair. He's also horrible in general, having a drinking problem and anger issues, and having defrauded his clients out of tons of money when he was a lawyer. However, even being all that he is, no one deserves to find their beloved pet in pieces inside a dryer like a sick prank and their best friend's corpse hidden in the walls of their home, followed by having their body invaded and then eaten by the house itself. He's a poor excuse for a person, but a highly pitiable one at that.
- The Assimilator: The House "eats" people. Its walls and furnishings reveal flesh and blood when tampered with, and body parts can be seen when it gets agitated.
- Black Dude Dies First: Milo is the first casualty of the movie.
- Bittersweet Ending: Don, Milo and Cooper are all killed by Sarah and the Nymph, but Liz manages to survive and free the spirits after exhuming Sarah's dead body and giving it a proper burial. Six months later, she is living in the house with her baby daughter. However, unbeknownst to her, Don's spirit is now haunting the house, watching over their daughter.
- Dark and Troubled Past: Sarah and Sadie (aka the Nymph), the ghosts presently haunting the house. They grew up sexually abused, to be used as part of an illegal brothel's nightly show, and eventually the owner simply murdered them and no one ever even went looking into their disappearance.
- Do Not Taunt Cthulhu: Don is in danger from the first moment he steps into the house, but it starts reacting quite agitatedly when he starts beating the walls in with a hammer in a rage. This eventually wakes the Nymph up, and it goes downhill from there.
- Evil Is Petty: The House will target any positive influences on its chosen victims who get within its walls, even if they're not hostile. This includes Milo and Cooper, Don's close friend and dog, respectively. The latter, it does purely because the occupant pissed it off.
- Facial Horror: The Nymph has a bizarre, mangled face that looks more like ground beef than anything. It's possible that this was the state her body was left in when she was originally killed. There's also the death of Milo, whose left eye is replaced by a gaping hole when Sarah hits him with a hammer and the state of (the fake) Don's face when Liz finds him after attempting to cut the Nymph's marbles out of his body.
- Game Face: Sarah is quite pretty (and hostile) and very seductive, but when the house wants a victim for its own, the Nymph comes out, who is quite a bit less pleasant to look at.
- Genius Loci: The house is alive, and aware. it is connected to the ghosts running the place.
- Genuine Human Hide: Sarah does this with Don's skin, hiding inside of it and using his voice to attempt to target and abuse Liz's love for him. It's not pretty when she comes out.
- The Gloves Come Off: The house is content to snack on Don's associates until his rage boils over and he attacks it, which leads to his death and assimilation. When Liz moves in, it tries the same tactics, but when she proves to be much more regimented and Genre Savvy, it's only her second visit before the House becomes a complete nightmare and the ghosts attack her.
- Humanoid Abomination: Sarah, the Nymph, and the House itself, who may all be one entity acting through multiple bodies.
- Incompatible Orientation: A bowling alley bartender early into the movie blurts out the question "are you queer?" to a very offended Don. As it turns out, he's not coming onto Don, he's just hoping against hope's sake that he'll prove immune to the local ghost that seduces men to their deaths.
- Jerkass: Don is generally unpleasant to begin with, lying to Liz behind her back and cheating on her, brushing it off like it's nothing and having the audacity to threaten Sarah to leave him alone. Then towards the end, he's revealed to have defrauded his clients out of their retirement funds.
- Kick the Dog: The dog gets much worse than kicked. It gets carved up and shoved into a washing machine where its body parts and head roll around for Don to find.
- Nightmare Fuel Coloring Book: The walls of the attic are covered in drawings left by the Nymph, detailing the House's history.
- Our Ghosts Are Different: Sarah and the Nymph. Sarah has powers of Offscreen Teleportation, seduces the protagonist to cheat with her, and has intimate knowledge of the House, but she can be dispatched physically. However, she doesn't stay dead long. The Nymph seems to be the true "core". She stays out of sight most of the time but comes out to "feed" when victims can't fight back—but she is highly vulnerable to physical damage and can be slain for a time, and doing so halts Sarah's attacks. Both are seemingly tied to the house.
- Pet the Dog: The only good quality Don has is that he adores Cooper, and is understandably angry when Sarah kills him.
- Police Are Useless: The lone policeman in the movie is quite possibly the least useful policeman in all of cinema. He is called to investigate a man's discovery of his chopped-up dog in his dryer, and is informed by the homeowner that someone unwelcome and with motive to do him harm has been skulking around the house. He simply laughs it off because Sarah, the implicated one, doesn't appear on the footage Don set up, and he leaves without doing the slightest damn thing to help.
- Rejected Apology: Liz rejects the one given to her by the fake Don.
- Secret Test of Character:
- The House preys on the vices of those that come within its walls. Failure to reign them in will let it get inside and torment them beyond their ability to fight back, and lying about their sins makes it worse. Those who are able to confront the issues within their lives and their own flaws are much harder for it to attack, and it will crank things up in response.
- Sarah pulls one on Liz; she hides in Don's skin and takes his form to try and get Liz to forgive him. However, the trick is that this is exactly what she wants. By forgiving Don, she would be embracing her own Doormat vice and allowing nothing to change. By refusing him, she passes the test.
- Ellie, the friendly neighbor who greets Don and Liz. She gives cryptic hints about the nature of the house. Don doesn't pick up on them, but Liz does. When Liz escapes, Ellie explains her motives along these lines.
- Seven Deadly Sins: Don embodies several of them in at least one way.
- Gluttony: Don clearly has a drinking problem and has made no attempt to restrain it while away from his wife.
- Greed: Don is using money that he defrauded from his clients to fund the house.
- Lust: The one that makes him most vulnerable to Sarah. Don is quite the horndog, soliciting his wife for nudes and, when this fails, watching porn until he falls asleep, and he gives in only too easily to Sarah's advances.
- Sloth: Don spends a lot of time sleeping, and blows off his slow progress on the house with excuses.
- Pride: Don is highly egotistic, insisting he can fix the house himself without help. When his dog appears to be judging him for an affair, he tells the pooch "I earned that."
- Wrath: This one gets him killed. He takes out his anger on the house, destroying its walls, and this results in the Nymph coming for him.
- Vagina Dentata: The face of The Nymph— particularly, her long sideways mouth studded with prominent teeth— seems to be invoking this.
- Women Are Wiser: Don falls to the ghost's temptations and is drawn in deeper by the house. Liz proves that she is not so easily manipulated and circumvents the attacks on her at every turn due to her control over her vices. Ellie, who bears a good deal of knowledge about what the house is like and its history, is shown to use that knowledge to try to push both occupants away from succumbing to the House.
