Red Rooms (2024)

This is a complex story and film to review as it has so many threads and meanings, some left to the imagination or one's own interpretation. But I'll have a go! It feels as though it is to do with our fascination as a species with true-crime podcasts, televised trials and the dark side of humanity. Red Rooms (original title Les Chambres Rouges) provides us with a psychologically tense film from French-Canadian filmmaker Pascal Plante. It is a piece that questions our morbid curiosity with all that stuff, via a chilling thriller - which you might well need to watch twice!

The film starts in a clinically-furnished Montreal courtroom at the beginning of a highly publicised trial. In the dock - or glass cage, in this case - is Ludovic Chevalier, an apparently emotionless man accused of the brutal murder of three teenage girls. The killer filmed their actions and broadcast them live to wealthy, anonymous bidders on a dark web 'Red Room' (an internet urban legend where the ultimate depravities are sold to the highest bidder).

The prosecution has got hold of two of the three videos, but the third one, featuring a girl named Camille, is missing. While they start the trial based on the available footage, the event becomes a total media circus, attracting grieving families, ambitious journalists, and, yes, a morbidly curious public. But rather than focusing on the lawyers, the cops or the victims, Red Rooms forces us to watch the entire trial through the eyes of the beautiful Kelly-Anne.

But Kelly-Anne is not your typical true-crime enthusiast - she is actually a wealthy, highly successful model, a cyber-security expert and a high-stakes online poker player who lives in a sterile, glass-covered block of flats as clinical as the courtroom itself. She is so deeply consumed by this trial, though, that she sleeps on the pavement outside the courthouse every night just to secure a front-row seat in the public gallery every morning.

Enter Clementine! A naive and vulnerable girl who has travelled to the city because she is utterly convinced of Chevalier’s innocence. Clementine is a Serial Killer Groupie - one of those people who befriend inmates on Death Row and hero-worship the likes of Charles Manson. Perhaps she is looking for somebody broken to fix. She argues his corner at every opportunity, including to the TV news cameras outside the court and via phone-in television shows.

Anyway, the relationship between these two forms the strange focus of the first half of this two-hour film. Unlikely as it would seem, Kelly-Anne feels sorry for Clementine having little money and nowhere to stay, so she takes her into her posh flat for the duration of the trial. Clementine acts very much like a child, with Kelly-Anne playing the role of a distant mother figure. It is all a bit odd and, yes, unlikely, but there will be more to unfold on that front later.

Back to the trial, and Kelly-Anne's behaviour changes from that of a clinically in-control observer to a slightly unhinged potential partaker in what is going on. Using her computer hacking skills, she begins dipping into the dark web, hunting for the missing evidence - the video of Camille - that the police failed to find. When Kelly-Anne interacts with the dark web, we don't see what she is seeing - the camera instead lingers on her face. We are watching her watching. Her reaction is not panic or disgust, but rather a trance-like, chilling fascination.

To understand Kelly-Anne, we are encouraged to understand her background in high-stakes poker. As she explains at one point to Clementine, her love for the game stems from a cold desire to see emotional people lose everything and to exploit their breaking points. She views the trial not as a search for justice, but as a complex, high-stakes game of poker against the killer, the defence and the law itself. She doesn't want to do good, she wants to win the game at all costs. Her online persona is Lady of Shalott - a nod to the Tennyson poem about a woman cursed to view the real world only through the reflection of a mirror from her isolated tower.

Juliette Gariépy plays Kelly-Anne with a gripping terror, really. She's ice-cold, clinical and thrilling to watch. Laurie Babin as Clementine plays a very different role but she, too, is convincing and does well. The rest of the cast all do their jobs faultlessly, but our two leads steal the show. The cinematography is always interesing and very nicely done with angles, lighting, focus and colour. Colour that often glows across the frame. Often the light emitted by a computer screen as we look at faces impacted. Often red, as you might imagine!

The film is multi-layered and complex, but interestingly, it relies very much on implied horror. There are no cheap jump-scares or gory special effects here! It is shot in a claustrophobic aspect ratio with a sterile, cold colour palette that locks you firmly into Kelly-Anne’s restricted worldview. It is tragic, deeply unsettling and a film that will stay with you long after curtains-down. Then you can watch it again!