The Dead Girl in Apartment 03
A movie like “The Dead Girl in Apartment 03” shoots its shot with its title alone. You can basically guess what the movie is going to be like with that description. But writer-director Kurtis Spieler doesn’t lean into what you might think with that title- it’s actually about the dead girl’s roommate, who’s alone after she discovered the body. Well, she might be alone. That’s why the story needs to unfold.
We begin in an interrogation room at a police station. Christian (Bryan Manley Davis) is being questioned by the officer in the room about a crime scene at his ex-girlfriend’s apartment. The ex-girlfriend is Laura (Laura Dooling), and earlier, she found her roommate dead in her room- she’d probably been there for a couple of days. There’s no sign of violence, but after the detectives leave, some strange things begin to happen.
One of the things that interested me about “The Dead Girl in Apartment 03” was that one of the stars is Adrienne King, the first “final girl” of the “Friday the 13th” franchise. Here, she plays Detective Richards, one of two on the case. Her and her partner, Detective Miller (Frank Wihbey), are trying to thread that live between being suspicious and being sympathetic with Laura; Miller is leaning towards sympathetic, but Richards knows it’s best to be skeptical until you can definitively rule someone out as a suspect. They add a compelling dimension to a relatively simple story, showing us why it’s best to wait for all the facts to be in. Even then, though, sometimes the truth makes it harder to explain.
The most interesting parts of this film are when it’s holding with Laura in the apartment. She’s trying to stay calm, but knowing she was there, unwittingly with a dead body, and seeing things in the room that point to something more supernatural gives her unease of being there alone, which is how Christian fits into things. There’s a good sense of atmosphere and tension in the film that Spieler sets in motion, and Dooling gives a good performance. The film is thin dramatically- it probably would have worked better as a short film- but it still gives us a decent hit of terror.
