Red Rooms (Pascal Plante, 2023).
A little irony from the land of Alanis Morissette: Red Rooms (2023)—a movie named for and concerning a series of apocryphal dark-web sites trafficking in unsimulated snuff videos—is currently unavailable for commercial streaming in the United States. This despite the fact that Pascal Plante’s Montreal-set thriller, which is up for six Canadian Screen Awards on May 30, is almost perfectly calibrated for American—which is to say global—sensibilities, to the point that it suggests a prestige streaming procedural shrunken down to feature length and fed through Google Translate. The only thing separating Juliette Gariépy’s statuesque, possibly sociopathic amateur hacker Kelly-Anne from her Scandinavian counterparts is the lack of a dragon tattoo.
This is not a put-down, nor even a backhanded compliment; in a year when the CSAs will likely be swept by Blackberry (2023), a revision of The Social Network (2010) by a group of resourceful Toronto pranksters, Red Rooms’s authentically Fincherian pacing and textures feel equally worthy of celebration, as does its skepticism about our collective mental health in an extremely online zeitgeist. Just a decade ago, Plante’s countryman Denis Villeneuve leveled up by so spectacularly directing American studio dreck in the form of Prisoners (2013)—itself a David Fincher rip-off emblematizing artistic (and moral) compromise. Red Rooms, which is at once smarter and scarier—and unabashedly French Canadian, not only in its setting and language, but in its omnipresent mediascape—takes a different sort of risk. It’s a movie that dares to leave threads dangling and doors ajar, allowing certain images and ideas to scuttle into your subconscious.
We open on a face: Kelly-Anne (Gariépy), twentysomething, sleeping rough and shivering in downtown Montreal in a knit toque, bathed in pre-dawn blue; she could be a student, or a vagabond. Beneath a pensive, circuitous harpsichord refrain, we watch her cruise the streets en route to the Palais du Justice. Under more flattering lighting, we can see that she’s strikingly beautiful and fashionably dressed, clearly not homeless, and yet somehow out of place amid the upscale professionals moving through the building’s security checkpoints. Kelly-Anne takes her seat in the audience of a public courtroom and the camera zeroes in on the back of her head. It is framed on one side by a glassed-in box housing a metal folding chair, into which the defendant, one Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), duly slumps into place. As the space fills with people, we realize that we’re at a murder trial, sutured into the scene as prospective jurors in what the judge and both legal teams promise, ominously and explicitly, will be an upsetting case. Despite the gory particulars of the crimes—which include the abduction, torture, and murder of three teenaged girls, as well as the private, for-profit dissemination of video footage of their ordeals—the most unnerving aspect of the prologue is the way the camera, which by now has mapped the entire chamber via a series of floating pans (beautifully choreographed in languorous real time by cinematographer Vincent Biron), locks into a slow zoom back toward Kelly-Anne. Her off-center stare is aimed somewhere between us and the accused, and also somehow beyond the screen: a pair of black eyes, avidly searching the middle distance.
The courtroom thriller is a sturdy old workhorse, but Red Rooms offers a series of variations: it mostly takes place in other locations, its main character has no direct connection to the case—she’s not a juror, nor a witness, nor a family member of one of the victims—and the lawyers never really come into focus as characters. The trial is only glimpsed in interludes, and its ending seems a foregone conclusion, eliciting little suspense. It would be a stretch to say that Plante is critiquing—or even meditating on—specific or universal questions of due process. Rather, the question is what kind of observer Kelly-Anne really is, and why she’s so determined to score her daily ringside seat at the proceedings as to camp out overnight near the courtroom. It’s a charade that feels disingenuous and sinister, suggesting ulterior motives beyond curiosity—maybe akin to those of Clementine (Laurie Babin), a raccoon-eyed small-towner in Montreal to support the so-called “Demon of Rosemont,” whom she believes to be innocent based on nothing but the voices in her head and the fluttering in her heart.
Red Rooms (Pascal Plante, 2023).
The phenomenon of serial-killer groupies—and specifically the condition of hybristophilia, a sexual attraction to those who commit violent crimes—is at the heart of Plante’s judiciously observed narrative. As we observe Kelly-Anne’s odd, potentially wayward behaviors, the possibility opens up that there may be a similar fetish in play. The film seems to offer these hints up forensically, as evidence—but evidence of what? Kelly-Anne, we learn, lives in an expensive, antiseptic high-rise building; she works as a freelance fashion model and supplements her income with her winnings from a Texas Hold ‘Em app, both ventures that require a certain intense unreadability. In the absence of any visible companionship (no partner, no family), she’s employed a custom-designed AI, à la Siri, to run her life. (In a rare bit of symbolic overreaching, her screen name is “The Lady of Shalott.”) Her poker-faced comportment extends to Clementine, whom she effectively adopts after a few days sitting together in court—again, for reasons that are hard to nail down. For one thing, she doesn’t exactly commiserate about Chevalier’s shabby treatment; when Clementine—who’s now staying at Kelly-Anne’s apartment—rants about the ensuing miscarriage of justice, her hostess humors her but refuses to engage. The pair are twin studies in obsession, but where one is an open book, the other is a gleaming, stainless steel hard drive whose contents seem impossible (and inadvisable) to crack.
Both Gariépy and Babin are up for Canadian Screen Awards, and their scenes together strike a few tender, affectionate notes (Kelly-Anne’s whippet-thin physique is maintained through racquetball, which flummoxes her houseguest). Ultimately, though, Clementine is less of a character than a device by which the film means to prod Kelly-Anne’s psychology. Clementine’s delusion is rooted in both the character’s sparse but suggestive backstory as a social outcast and a larger history encompassing various Manson girls and the ’90s Canadian tabloid fixture Karla Homolka, whose shadow falls over the action. Homolka claimed that she had been an unwilling accomplice in a series of murders perpetrated by her husband, Paul Bernardo, but was later revealed via video tapes as a more active participant— prompting local media to recast her plea bargain as a “deal with the Devil.” In a supremely uncomfortable scene, Clem phones into a TV panel show whose members mock her for being off her meds. Kelly-Anne’s pathology feels more singular, and possibly sinister, especially the way she keeps watching one of the victims’ mothers out of the corner of her eye. The narrative reaches a turning point of sorts when, about halfway through the trial, it’s announced that videos of the murders will be shown in the courtroom, including a few fleeting glimpses of the masked killer; Clementine wants to watch, but Kelly-Anne tells her she shouldn’t. She’s seen them already, and no good can come of it.
Images of absolute stage-managed abjection have significant currency in the genre-movie landscape, and several of this century’s most ostensibly transgressive thrillers—including John Erick Dowdle’s The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007) and Michael Goi’s Megan is Missing (2011)—pivot on the discovery (and presentation) of homemade torture porn. It’s a mug’s game to theorize whether such films, consciously or not, represent gestures of de- or re-sensitization to obscenity; it’s just as easy for a bludgeoning opportunist like Srdjan Spasojevic (A Serbian Film, 2010) to claim that such funny gamesmanship is encased in political allegory (or Hitchcockian traditions of audience-implication) as it is for Michael Haneke. Plante has cited the latter in interviews, which makes sense insofar as Red Rooms probes the psychological impact of witnessing extreme violence, but he never academicizes these ideas or descends into finger-wagging pedantry; instead, they’re threaded through the unfolding drama. Clementine thinks that she needs to see the footage to prove that her much-maligned love object is innocent, while subconsciously longing to be freed from her crush. As for Kelly-Anne, it’s unclear not only where and how she got the file, but why she’s held onto it and, more than that, opted to view its contents—a fine line between curiosity and masochism, and then again between masochism and something potentially even darker.
In terms of on-screen content, Red Rooms is nowhere near as explicit as the movies mentioned above, and, when it comes to the snuff videos, it hews closer to Haneke-ish austerity than immersion in gore; Plante is smart enough to know that when it comes to this sort of material, a very little bit goes a long way (and that that goes for sound design as well as visuals). But the film is still capable of whipping up nightmare fuel, as in the sequence where Kelly-Anne shows up for a pivotal courtroom session in an outfit that triggers a series of horrific—and telling—responses among various concerned parties, including, perhaps, the audience, who might at this point be worried for the character’s sanity. Her act of provocation—captured in the most strident of the film’s many head-on close-ups—not only gives the film its signature, scarifying image (one that’s also horribly sad and perverse in context), but it also illustrates how all of Kelly-Anne’s fanatical self-control operates in the service of self-negation. Depending on how we read Plante’s storytelling—and Gariépy’s performance—she’s a person who’s either capable of anything or in thrall to urges she doesn’t understand, or maybe both at once, a possibility that pressurizes her action in the home stretch.
The first time that I watched Red Rooms, I wasn’t sure that I approved of the story’s destination, which felt not only predictable but mechanical, albeit in an effective, well-engineered way. Looking at the movie again a few months later convinced me that whatever the outer shape of the narrative, Plante and Gariépy ultimately remain true to the roiling interiority of their joint creation. They pose the question of whether it’s possible to do the right things for the wrong reasons, and also of how a character glimpsed gazing fully dilated into the digital inferno might come to see not only the world, but also herself. The final passages of the film feel methodical in ways that transcend plot points or narrative resolution; the spectacle is of a character trying to control—and then extricate herself from—a situation on her own eccentric terms, which are the only ones left available to her. There’s a version of Red Rooms in which Kelly-Anne’s eccentricities are fully reconciled with her role as a righteous, Lisbeth Salander–ish avenger, but, to Plante’s credit, that’s not the movie he’s made. Instead, we end the way we began, at an intimate but unbridgeable distance from a character whose cards remain close to her chest. Hence the desire—again reminiscent of Fincher’s uniquely durable thrillers—to watch the film again. By giving us so much to look at and think about, and then stranding us just short of understanding—or satisfaction—Red Rooms implores us to return, to the screen and in our minds, for another harrowing encounter.