Film Review — "Red Rooms"
“Did you hear about the new restaurant called Karma?
There’s no menu. You get what you deserve.”
Sorry to start out gauche, but the way I had to watch Red Rooms was not ideal. At least, not at first. The digital screener could not be AirPlayed to my living room TV and sound system, so I was forced to either watch it on my iPad or not at all. Usually, predicaments like this annoy the absolute shit out of me—and it did in the beginning—but somehow this unfortunate viewing arrangement… ended up kinda working for Red Rooms in the end?
First of all, I was not going to give up and forfeit the chance to cover a movie that so many horror critics called one of the most unnerving, upsetting, disturbing, etc. films of the past year. No way, Esmé! So, I donned my big over-the-ear Princess Leia side buns-looking headphones and hit play.
Thankfully, Pascal Plante’s direction drew me in pretty quickly. Picture it! Montréal, Québec. It’s Day 1 of a much-discussed serial murder trial. A man named Ludovic Chevalier has been charged with killing three teenage girls and auctioning off video-recordings of each sadistic murder to big-spending sickos on the dark web.
As the prosecution and the defense offer their opening statements, Pascal captures the proceedings in long take. His camera slowly and scrupulously floats around the sterile-white courtroom, directing our attention to the key figures in the case, as we hear the lurid details; the oddly clinical appearance of the space helps our eye land on whatever or whomever Pascal wants it to, like Kelly-Anne, who sits at the back of the room. She’s a professional model and computer whiz with a morbid fascination with the case.
Choosing what we glean and when and how is Pascal Plante’s forte.
He also has a penchant for shaking things up. The moment Kelly-Anne exits the courtroom, she’s suddenly blitzed by reporters who want her opinions on everything, and, in a sense, we’re blitzed, too, as Pascal ditches the smooth, tranquil camerawork from the trial and temporarily adopts a visually assaultive, juicy evening news style of shooting. It’s jarring as hell.
Pascal approaches scenes—and scene transitions—conceptually, and I admire that. He determines what the purpose of each scene is, how he wants the audience to feel, then directs, shoots, and edits accordingly. He doesn’t settle for throwing a camera on sticks and letting the script speak for itself or making his actors do all the heavy lifting. Pascal knows he’s making cinema and acts like it.
He shifts gears again in Kelly-Anne’s small high-rise apartment, where the vibe is decidedly different from any other location. The lighting is usually on the dimmer side and the framing is often tight. The main light sources are the brightness from Kelly-Anne’s dual monitor setup and whatever ambient illumination passes through the floor-to-ceiling windows when the curtains aren’t drawn. There’s something so cold about Kelly-Anne’s dismal, sparsely decorated home environment, and it reflects her quasi-psychopathic behavior. Removed. Impersonal. Mostly devoid of expression.
It’s not easy to stay a captivating protagonist when the role calls for your face to be continually vacant, but Juliette Gariépy pulls it off. The pitfall of bringing a morose character like Kelly-Anne to life would be the temptation to steadily veer into affectless automaton territory, which Gariépy deftly avoids. Kelly-Anne may read as withdrawn and frigid, but there is a twisted ember smoldering somewhere within her that can only be fueled by the macabre. Her troubling fascination with the facts surrounding the Ludovic Chevalier case keeps her allure, as a character, alive.
Pascal balances out Kelly-Anne’s closed-off nature with the über-emotional Clémentine. We meet Clémentine at the end of Day 1 after Kelly-Anne declines to give the media the sensational quote they so obviously crave. Instead, the hot mics gravitate toward the much more spirited and outspoken Clémentine, who’s not just interested in the case—she’s a Ludovic Chevalier defender who passionately asserts that he’s innocent. Why does she think so? She just does.
Laurie Babin’s performance as Clémentine is imbued with pathos and an uneasy humor. Unlike Kelly-Anne, she externalizes her feelings. It’s pitiful at times, her ardent dedication to an alleged murderer she’s never even met. But it’s not unheard of, of course. Pascal uses the character of Clémentine to question the very existence—and the utter silliness—of serial killer groupies. Like, what’s your deal, babe? Is this guy really your Beatle? Clémentine, by her nature, is foolish, and this dark film definitely needs a fool, one who will ask Guinevere (the name of Kelly-Anne’s digital voice assistant) to tell her jokes, then giggle at the punchlines. It’s cute and adds levity, but it’s also sad. Even the brief comic moments we’re allotted are pretty dismaying at their core.
In fact, Red Rooms, as a film, truly never stops being deeply troubling.
So, too, is hyper-fixating on a true crime case—in a callous, egocentric manner that goes far beyond a passing interest or plain old curiosity, to a place where empathy for the victims and their loved ones is thrown out the window and the fanatic becomes a zealot willing to cross any line they need to—ethics and privacy laws be damned!
Re-enter Kelly-Anne, who “knows where to look” to find things on the dark web. (What even is that, really? I just go with it, to be honest.) She may not be a groupie like Clémentine, but Kelly-Anne’s infatuation is sick nonetheless. A decent chunk of the runtime is of her poking around on the [dark] internet. When she’s not winning money playing online poker or committing crimes herself by hacking into digital databases to obtain sealed evidence, she’s hunting for stuff the investigators couldn’t locate, like the coveted missing murder tape of one of the victims.
Pascal sagely shows very little of the murder videos; we mostly hear the recordings. He reveals enough to establish the redness of the killer’s kill chamber, then makes the conscious choice to give the killer as little attention as possible so that we may keep our focus on the obsessed ones instead. After all, it’s their neuroses that drives this story. Alongside a quivering Laurie Babin, Juliette Gariépy demonstrates a disconcerting equilibrium in one of the film’s best images: Clémentine and Kelly-Anne, painted in the bright red light of the computer glow, consuming their flavor of forbidden fruit.
The scenes at Kelly-Anne’s computer—sometimes seeing things from the monitor’s POV—are what made my iPad-watching experience work, I think. When Kelly-Anne is on the web looking at something, somehow, with my iPad in my hands, it felt like being there with her, partaking in something taboo, edging close to something dangerous. It felt like I was complicit, and… dare I say, I loved it?
