When directors make their first film, it’s not uncommon for their effort to resemble the films of more iconic filmmakers.  It’s not always a bad trap to fall into—after all, it makes sense to steal from the best.

    The plot for The Fourth Floor, the first film of Josh Klausner, is, for example, prime Roman Polanski.  A young interior designer (Juliette Lewis) moves into a rent-controlled apartment left vacant by the death of her aunt.  Her boyfriend, weatherman William Hurt, is irritated because they’d just gotten a place together, but at $400 a month for a large one-bedroom in New York, who can blame her?

    The apartment building has its share of problems, however.  The local busybody (Shelley Duvall) wanders through the halls at odd moments, a fellow in a trenchcoat (Austin Pendleton) creeps around but seems generally pleasant, the man across the street may have murdered his wife and worst of all, the old woman who lives below Lewis leaves angry notes and forces bugs into her apartment whenever Lewis makes any noise.  It’s standard “weirdos-around-a-house” stuff with a bit of the “is-she-going-insane?” thrown in, the kind of thing Polanski pretty much perfected with The Tenant and Repulsion over 30 years ago.

    Juliette Lewis takes a break from playing white trash idiots by playing a white collar idiot.  She’s a typical slasher movie heroine, running around with minimal personality solely to be driven nuts by whoever is taunting her.  Perhaps this was meant as a sequel to The Other Sister—how else could you rationalize a lead so stupid as to not only break into a suspicious neighbor’s apartment (instead of, say, asking the police to confront them face-to-face) but to answer the trespass victim’s door buzzer when it rings?   So no points for having a leading character that gets any sympathy.

    While some of the quirky bits of the characters are appealing, and the fine supporting cast (Duvall, Pendleton, Tobin Bell as a locksmith, Artie Lange as the landlord and Robert Costanzo as an exterminator) are fun to watch, most of them aren’t given enough screen time to carry the film.  On top of that, it all turns out to be weirdness for the sake of weirdness, and there’s a hefty amount of sub-plots that veer off to nothing.

    This could be overlooked, of course, if the ending had some impact.  While the finale makes some sense and wraps things up rather well (if typically), it blows it all in an epilogue that just destroys any of the motivation of the person behind all of this that the climax carefully sets up.

    Fortunately, as much as Klausner the writer takes from Polanski, Klausner the director nabs from Stanley Kubrick.  The film is scattered with Kubrick touches, from the obvious (the presence of Shelley Duvall running around like a mad chicken, close-ups of a peephole that look remarkably like HAL’s “eye”) to the pacing (short scenes that establish set-up rather than forward the plot slowly fading into the next, a slow, moody score) and several of these bits are quite effective.  In fact, a good percentage of the film is well-shot and nicely put together.

    It’s too bad, then, that The Fourth Floor falls apart in the final execution.  The clichés are plenty (Groan! As the psycho gets knocked out one second—then vanishes in the next shot!), William Hurt is so bland you may mistake him for asphalt and there’s too many plots that go nowhere to really be worth recommending.  If you keep your expectations planted firmly on the ground, The Fourth Floor offers a couple minor thrills and has the best use of packing peanuts I’ve ever seen in a movie, but don’t expect to walk away satisfied.