James Y. Lee
Content warning: This review will be dealing with sensitive subjects, including sexual abuse and the online dissemination of exploitative material. Reader discretion is advised.
Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms is a film that, from the very beginning, understands how much unsettlement can be mined from obscurity and unreadability. Its initial moments are literally the opening arguments to the murder trial of Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe Lokos)—the perfect primer to the abyssal depths of abhorrence about to be uncovered over time. Set to the backdrop of a cleanly-white courtroom, the prosecution goes first. They tell the jury that this man, christened the “Demon of Rosemont,” is nothing short of a complete monster, one who murdered three girls who were barely teenage, mutilating and sexually abusing them to an online audience in “red rooms”—a real online urban legend describing restricted-access livestreams broadcast only to the dark web, the subsection of the internet where every user who enters it is anonymous by default. The defense is made to follow, pinning the fault on the prosecution for seemingly condemning Chevalier for these horrific crimes without proof that can condemn him beyond a reasonable doubt. Throughout the trial, we will never fully see any of the graphic aftermath of these crimes.
And yet, sitting in the gallery, past the members of the jury, past the prosecution and defense, past the screens hung up on top that shows photos of the three girls, is a fashion model named Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), whose eyes are unblinkingly fixed on the glass box containing Chevalier. Even the film demonstrates a similar formal fixation, it seems, as cinematographer Vincent Biron’s camera gradually zooms in on her curious gaze at the tail-end of a minutes-long oner, her near-perfectly still expression an uneasy cipher, unnerving precisely because of its unknowability. But she’s not quite alone; when the trial’s first day ends moments later, she runs into Clementine (Laurie Babin), a young woman whose first appearance in the film shows her passionately espousing Chevalier’s innocence to news reporters who seem more intent on grilling her with questions than anything else. She’s among the outcast handful of people in Montreal who not only believe that Chevalier’s innocent, but also are obsessively, romantically infatuated with him—and soon enough, Kelly-Anne becomes the first person she seeks out company in.
Plante’s film ventures where few dare to tread — into the most abhorrent trenches of modern online life, where exploitation and voyeurism are driven to their most unspeakable limits. It’s also a film that functions as a character study, dedicated to critiquing how we’ve grown to aggressively manifest our obsessions over tragedies and crimes that leech off of devastating, real-life impacts. To that end, for the first act or so of Red Rooms, Kelly-Anne and Clementine’s connection takes center stage, unease permeating their every front of unfettered, lurkingly perverse curiosity. The latter predominantly tries to gain the former’s attention through her continued insistence of Chevalier’s innocence, while the former’s reciprocated attempts to involve Clementine in her life (bringing her to her fashion photoshoots, tagging her along on visits to the gym, etc.) betray a deeper level of access and understanding into the true nature of Chevalier’s case.
The two exist as different faces of how obsession interacts with true crime. On one end, the roots of Clementine’s hybristophilia—a romantic obsession with serial killers—is never explicitly explained, but she partakes in a well-documented tradition where murderers like Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer would have fans approaching them in court or sending them fan mail in prison. Her level of care towards Chevalier is overbearing and insensitive, clearly meant to recklessly fill some kind of internal void for affection and attention. It’s persistent enough for her to call up a talk show and brazenly voice her belief about Chevalier’s innocence, only to be verbally eviscerated for a laugh by its hosts seconds later—evidently, as we find out from her tears, not the reaction she was remotely seeking.
Kelly-Anne, however, is a far different story, and is the one whose intentions remain buried under a stare so intent on hiding something that it begs to be further examined. We get enough of who she is on the surface; she’s a consummate professional in the modeling business, intently focused on success to the point where she’s regularly being featured on front pages online. Her only regular companion is an AI assistant named Gueniévre, who’s literally framed in a tiny screen right above her double-monitor setup, occasionally cracking jokes and reading Kelly-Anne’s emails to her. One of her most noteworthy exchanges with Clementine is her explanation for what makes a good poker player—she’d know best, after all, as she’s constantly betting Bitcoin on private poker servers, and playing to her advantages each and every game. The key, she says, is emotionlessness and unreadability; any play you make dictated by your feelings will doom you to impulse, and make you even more predictable to your opponents who want to leech you of everything you have.
Where Red Rooms shines best is when Plante and Gariépy take that unreadability and drive it to new extremes with each level of access she gains into the nature of the Chevalier case. It starts with a moment that peels open a well-known, yet subconsciously frightening truth about merely existing online; your information is freely open for anyone to use, and all it takes is for a single data leak of your workplace for wildly resourceful people like Kelly-Anne to find out everything she needs to know about you. Indeed, that’s exactly how she discovers the address of one of the murdered girls’ family and promptly finds a way to remotely control its digital security system with chilling efficiency.
Unsurprisingly, yet still disturbingly, her behavior only gets murkier from there. As the case continually thickens, with video evidence from Chevalier’s red-room livestreams proving particularly pivotal to fully cementing Chevalier’s guilt, we find out along with Clementine the utterly depraved extent to which Kelly-Anne is actually ahead of the authorities—and the extent to which she could possibly stay that way. And as if to further obscure this already unnerving character study, her motivations are just as much of a walking mystery, a near-constant factor even despite some deeply shocking turns Kelly-Anne’s character undergoes. Even with all of this access, Gariépy’s seamless control of Kelly-Anne’s every expression keeps disquietingly unclear just what she intends to do with, and what she wants from, all the of the forbidden knowledge she keeps so close to her hard drives.
While the sterile seamlessness of the film’s sound design, Biron’s cinematography, and Laura Nhem’s production design (best accentuating both the courtroom and Kelly-Anne’s near-empty high-rise apartment) all work in unsettlingly refined simpatico, there are moments when the horror of Red Rooms becomes so profound that it threatens to burst through the seams and tear down that aesthetic composure. It’s in those moments that Plante’s film is at its most imposing; when its gestures toward inference and suggestion direct your mind towards the absolutely unimaginable. Whether it be the visceral sounds of agonizing death, the gazes that hide morbid obsessions, or the search for evidence that could point one either towards justice or further depravity, Red Rooms‘ most obvious source of horror is the way it knows how readily accessible all of this darkness has become online. It is brilliantly, sharply aware—perhaps far too sharply—just how much that darkness is no longer a subject of disgust, but of a perverse, voyeuristic, and widely propagated fascination.
But there are small details that Plante sneaks in to indicate that we’ve been doing this kind of morbid, misguided inference forever. Kelly-Anne’s online username, after all, is Lady-of-Shallot—an allusion to Lord Alfred Tennyson’s 1842 poem of the same name, in which Elaine of Astolat, stranded in a tower across the river from Camelot, is unable to directly look at it due to an unexplained curse. Instead, she turns to a magic mirror that displays images and reflections of the people of Camelot from afar, which she then weaves into only partially-representative tapestries, stricken often by a quiet loneliness. “I am half-sick of shadows,” she says midway through the poem, exhausted of her hand-woven facsimiles of the world she is trapped from seeing. Who else, then, ends up turning Kelly-Anne’s gaze out the window and bringing about her curse, other than her very own “Sir Lancelot”—who surely must find her beautiful?
