Recensioni de* critic*

By denying us cheap thrills, and by pointedly going in the other direction, Red Rooms highlights their absence. This picture about people obsessed with criminals and their grisly crimes confronts us with the mystery of who the obsessives truly are; the questions we ask of Kelly-Anne could also be asked of all us genre fiends.

Chillingly accomplished... [Red Rooms is] a stylish, unsettling blend of courtroom drama and psychological thriller with a touch of cyber-paranoia thrown in... Plante’s measured pacing and cool, dispassionate storytelling burrow into the skin of the character. It’s not a comfortable place in which to spend time.

Plante never throws gore in the audience’s face because this isn’t a horror film with the catharsis of bloodletting. This is a character study in extremis, built around the strengthening bond and rising tension between an aimless serial killer lover and her more driven but mysterious counterpart.

In contrast to most movies about serial killers, [Red Rooms] offers nary a glimpse of violence, let alone any wallowing in sadism. Yet somehow that makes it all the more icky — at times the squirm factor is such that you may think no shower could wash a viewer’s taint-by-association away.

Gariépy reveals very little about her character’s state of mind... and this ambiguity is what makes “Red Rooms” so intriguing... Her icy inscrutability makes her a fascinating angle into a case that’s nothing but prurient interest, her dead eyes and blank expression a canvas onto which the viewer can project their feelings about snuff films, sadism, and the bottomless depths of human depravity.

Blending courtroom drama and claustrophobic tech-tinged nightmare, Red Rooms is a striking and austere examination of the true-crime industrial complex that benefits from its formality and disturbingly removed protagonist.

With a gaze that flings daggers, Gariépy’s an anchoring force that makes the [film's] more deranged second act feel credible. Most importantly, it’s her face... that works together with the film’s restraint to tug at our morbid curiosity.

[Red Rooms] feels inauthentic in the sleight-of-hand way it invites you to believe that if even if red rooms don’t exist – and there is no evidence that they do – they probably will very soon. There is something too easy and credulous about all of this. There is also something too easy about that all-purpose figure who is always being wheeled out in movies and fiction: the brilliant hacker... All of that shouldn’t take away, though, from what is an outstanding performance from Gariépy.

[Red Rooms] doesn’t attempt to rip up the rulebook of how courtroom dramas operate so much as it tries grappling with the sensationalized allure of murder cases and the disastrous consequences of third-party observers feeding off the personal trauma of others. That it manages to be so critical whilst succeeding as a nihilistic thriller at face value... is its greatest achievement.

Red Rooms interrogates how a mixture of desensitization and a desire to assert oneself as a protagonist of other people’s lives threatens to make content out of the vilest of humanity, and how the only thing preventing someone from being sucked down a moral whirlpool is to catch sight of their own zombified reflection on their computer screen.

[Plante] demonstrates powerful stylistic control over his provocative material, from the elegantly chilly visuals and ominous sound effects (that whistling wind seems as if it’s echoing through Kelly-Anne’s hollow soul) to Dominique Plante’s eerie score, which sounds like a Bach fugue having a breakdown. Even more impressive are the lead performances.

[Plante's] cool-headed, clear-eyed and unsensational approach only serves to heighten the film’s sickening tension. It’s an uncomfortable watch, but a extremely effective one.