spoilers
Well.. that was.. 92 minutes of my life I’ll never get back.
I don’t have much to say as this movie is pretty stagnant. Sure, there is some plot progression and the story moves forward with some deaths and gore. And yet, it feels like absolutely nothing happens. Maybe this is because there’s a complete lack of logic, an abysmal use of storytelling, or simply a completely unbearable main character.
The story begins by introducing us to Don, a ‘hardcore’ Don Draper knock off without any of the charisma and motivation that the Mad Men protagonist carries. Having seemingly crawled out of the incels playbook of what makes a man. Don is an angry, self absorbed prick who seems to have no motivation for his actions other than the lazy explanation of “he’s just a dick”. He is rude and abrasive to everyone he meets with little to no variation in how he treats a friend, a woman he’s interested in cheating with, a random man at a bar, or a police officer who pissed him off. He even appears to have the same abrasive attitude toward his dog, who seemingly means nothing to him as his only reaction to finding his dog dead in the dryer is more abrasion. The writing is so lazy I checked out of this movie about half way through, with no character depth or arc there is nothing there but a stereotype so uninteresting I considered turning off the movie all together.
Then there’s the lack of attention to detail. Don seemingly doesn’t want any other ‘jerkoff’ working on his house, but when he comes across giant oozing holes in the wall which any normal person would call a mold inspector for, he starts ripping it apart with his bare hands and then simply plasters over it? Then he moves insulation with his bare hands, and pulls gunk out of the walls with his bare hands. Could they not add $5 gloves to their budget? Anyway, I’m getting off track, but this was seriously distracting. Part of me wants to believe this was Stevens’ way of showing us that Don is a selfish fuck up who puts minimal effort into everything he does, but again, it simply felt lazy.
Now the wife. Liz, Bunny, whatever you want to call her. Another character that makes me roll my eyes. When we finally get a poorly timed explanation as to why they’re there in the first place, giving us Don’s motivation at the END of the film, we finally see his wife’s frustration and hesitations with him. However, throughout the movie the couple face times and she seems to be head over heels in love with him. She tells the pastor he is a fuck up, a liar and defrauder, a cheat. Yet she continuously tells Don she trusts him and she truly blindly does. Why? Her character flips from a blindly trusting wife to a strong independent woman who can do it all without him with little to no actual development or reasoning for her to change - Don continues to be who he has always been, so what's her motivation?
As I briefly mentioned before, the story sequence is all but unwatchable. Character motivations are vaguely revealed at the end of the movie. Odd bits of information are thrown in throughout and while they would be helpful to know, Stevens takes the withholding approach. An approach that only works when timing is properly handled. An air of mystery is all fine and well, but it needs to be mystery that unfolds, not confusion that haphazardly gives slight answers in the end.
Girl on the Third Floor (2019)’s only redeeming quality is Sarah. And even then redeeming might be a bit of a stretch. Sarah Brooks, who plays Sarah Yates in the film is one of the only actors that doesn’t feel as if they are trying out for a C list role on a poorly produced hulu series. Her anger and pain, as well as her seduction are believable and well acted, while her body language only amplifies her performance. The reasoning behind my saying that redeeming may be a stretch is due to the characters choices at the end of the movie. The set up leads us down the path of imagining that this ghost is bent on revenge against men, highlighted by her saying to Liz, “all men really love is the power you give them”. But then it begs the question, why go after Liz at all?
This is a trope I continuously see in horror movies that appear to have a message that men will use and abuse women for their own advantage and pleasure. And it is a trope I’m oh-so-tired of seeing. The trope of the ghost woman who has been wronged by or abused by the man turns into the abuser herself. Not against the men in the story, they are often doing what we expect them to, but against the women. Each and every time we get a story like this we see the ghost woman become so obsessed with her pain that she continues the cycle of hurt and goes after everyone, not simply those deserving of it - like Don. And I have to ask, why do we keep allowing this? Does this not continue the cycle of the belief that the abused becomes the abuser? Do these creators not see that these moments completely strip away any weight their message actually held and instead strips it down to the misogynistic idea of the scorned woman? Questions I think this movie could have benefited from asking itself before taking every misstep it did.
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