Stevens makes you want to explore Don’s Freudian abode by playing up the sound of glass marbles lazily rolling across wood floors; a silhouette’s ambiguous shape behind a frosted window pane; and the steady, soft clanking of a dumb waiter’s metal chain as it rises up a narrow, asbestos-filled passage. There’s a dark spot on the wall that crumbles when you touch it, and you really can’t go far without spotting the milk-white fluid that spills out of and over odd places (yes, that is a used condom). Don’s new home is also decorated with floral wallpaper, bouquet-like moldings, and even a few Victorian-era drawings of clothing-free nymphs. It’s a fixer-upper that’s just as much defined by clean lines and empty space as it is by a gigantic hole in the ceiling and way too much gunk in the plumbing.
This collection of bewitching, genre-friendly amenities often stands in for Don’s repressed emotions. Which makes sense given how focused Don is on improving his new home, stubbornly preparing and patching it up all on his own, and with only a small tool kit (an ex-colleague and family friend compares it to a Swiss-Army knife), while his concerned wife Liz (Trieste Kelly Dunn) offers support from afar through video-calls. Don’s new home also has a past, as we are told by inviting supporting characters like local bartender Geary (Marshall Bean) and pastor Ellie (Karen Wooditsch). But Don knows what he’s getting into, as he tells them…he just thinks he knows how to handle himself better than he actually does. “Girl on the Third Floor” can be read as Don’s passion play, complete with a tempting and mysterious neighbor (Sarah Brooks) and a rightfully on-guard German Shepherd (Cooper, Don’s companion) who won’t stop barking whenever something bumps around in the night. Which it naturally and regularly does.
Still, while there’s nothing startling about how Don behaves—some of his actions are typical of the sort of macho, won’t-pull-over-and-ask-for-directions fuddy-duddy alpha male—his story is still pretty involving given how it’s eventually revealed to be about what Don’s thinking of when he’s not thinking about fixing his house. There’s some sex in the movie, but it’s mostly implied (there’s even a scene where Cooper is left outside of his owner’s bedroom while Don gets down to business). Stevens is less coy about gore and explicit violence: he gives us a good look at the crater in one supporting character’s forehead after a lethal sledgehammer attack. But even these violent outbursts are handled with enough care to make the periodic eruption of bodily fluids seem not only morbidly funny, but also weirdly essential. Here’s that tortured masculinity you never asked for; pretty gross, huh?
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