‘Red Rooms’ Review – A Sharp Examination Of Society’s Obsession With Murder Is The Year’s Most Chilling Film

Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) has as much of a thing for technology as she does darkness, literal and figurative. Her Quebec apartment befits that of a junior trader at a financial institution, its floor-to-ceiling windows and gadgets galore feeling like a stretch for a young woman whose stream of income appears to come solely from part-time modeling and an addiction to online poker. But she’s successful enough at both, and she operates best in dimly lit spaces, those that are only made maneuverable by the glare dancing off of her computer and/or television screen. Occasionally, said glare is a harsh, startling red. Where that shade is coming from is not immediately clear. Then again, nothing is, not in Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms, a chilling slow-burn of a thriller that makes most procedurals of the moment look tame by comparison.

The film opens with the beginning of the trial of Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), who has been accused of brutally murdering three teenage girls. Their deaths – grisly killings that have both fascinated and horrified the nation – were livestreamed on the dark web, and bid upon by paying customers eager to own their own digital copy of each crime. Kelly-Anne, in between modeling gigs, has made it her mission to sit in on the trial to the point where she tends to sleep on the street around the corner of the courthouse to ensure that she has a front-row seat as a member of the public gallery. Why, exactly, has this young woman become so interested in the maneuverings and trial of a potential madman? Plante isn’t particularly interested in specifics – again, motivations are not made painstakingly clear for his characters so as to fuel an ambiguous fire that serves the film’s overall tonality – but it’s evident that he finds our world’s obsessions with crime and those who commit it, especially when it comes to murder, worthy of exploration. How he depicts that intense desire to understand and/or learn about the most wicked minds imaginable is almost certainly the most disturbing thing you’ll see in a film this year, and perhaps more unsettling than anything we’ve seen in many years. It makes Longlegs look like an episode of Arthur. 

Yet the best part about Plante’s conceit for Red Rooms is just how elusive he remains over the course of its runtime, never willing to reveal a clue before he feels it’s appropriate and almost reticent to show exactly how gruesome the crimes in question might have been. The trial itself is where the most graphic video is showcased, a theme that fascinates Kelly-Anne while upsetting a young unhoused woman named Clementine (Laurie Babin), who wholeheartedly believes in Chevalier’s innocence. Kelly-Anne takes Clementine in for a spell, offering her a place to stay during the trial, and the two form a bond over their shared fixation. 

While Kelly-Anne’s feelings on the defendant fall into somewhat of a gray area compared to Clementine’s, both have strong emotional pulls to his essence, a curious ordeal given how blank the suspected murderer tends to be at every stage of the hearing. McCabe-Lokos spends much of Red Rooms hunching his back and slouching his shoulders, as though he’s aiming to appear small; his face, on the other hand, doesn’t show remorse nor pride for the crimes he has supposedly committed. His mouth seems to be perpetually slanted in a frown, but from indifference, not sadness. This is precisely what leads both women to find something in him that they wish to protect and invest in. The only difference between them is that one wants him free, while the other is more curious as to what it might mean if Chevalier did, indeed, commit these unforgivable acts.

To his credit, Plante never relieves his audience of the dread his film consumes them with; it would actually be more appropriate to say that he continues to up the ante as the film continues, the temperature of its unease forever threatening to reach its boiling point. And that it’s not always in the most horrifying manner makes it that much more effective. Take Kelly-Anne’s custom A.I. assistant, “Guinevere”: Our “protagonist,” if you can call her that, is so reliant on her machines to dictate the daily to-do of her life that she has become entirely disinterested in the outside world. Her correspondence with Clementine is an outlier when put up against how often Kelly-Anne communicates with her Alexa knockoff, who does everything from organizing her calendar to telling knock-knock jokes that go far beyond Siri’s sense of humor. But the device’s existence in and of itself hints at something more dire, the notion that our dependence on technology is paving the way toward a penchant for darkness, both physical and emotional.

As Kelly-Anne’s internal gloom begins to match that of her surroundings, Red Rooms may veer off the road for some, especially when she shows up to the courtroom wearing a plot-appropriate outfit that is too good to spoil, and might feel a bit over the top for a character that has otherwise been so reserved over the course of the film. But Plante never lets things get too absurd; in fact, the evolution of his main character never feels rushed nor pedestrian in its plodding, instead unfolding at an appropriate pace for a woman slowly going mad. 

When film characters come undone, they tend to do so in a manner that sees their descent start off slow, only to swerve toward full-on insanity in the home stretch. That may be true for Kelly-Anne, but never has it felt more fitting than it does in Red Rooms. For so long, she is able to maintain a poker face – fitting – while surfing the dark web for blood-soaked murder tapes, and when it becomes too much for the sane person within her to bear, the opposite side reveals itself, welcoming the future with open arms. If said future is anything like Red Rooms it will be worth watching. Whether we can stomach it again is another question altogether.

Red Rooms is currently playing in select theaters and is available on VOD courtesy of Utopia.