by Nick Taylor
As you may remember from last week, I made a threat and promise to talk about contemporary horror this October. We’ve arrived. Hands down the best horror film I’ve seen from this year is the Canadian thriller Red Rooms, a 2023 release by Pascal Plante that’s just completed a months-long journey across festivals and art house cinemas before arriving in your hard drives through a menacing mp4 file. It’s a nasty, skin-crawling film, diving into the world of true crime prurience and online torture porn through the vantage of one of the year’s most intimidating performances. Wanna know more? Follow me under the cut...
Red Rooms begins with opening statements for the trial of accused serial killer Ludovic Chevalier. He is charged with brutally torturing, killing, and dismembering three pubescent girls, a grotesque act made even crueler because Chevalier broadcast the crimes on a live video feed and sold the footage to the highest bidder. It’s hosted in, a corner of the dark web called “Red Rooms” where people pay exorbitant fees to watch live murders and save them onto their hard drives. Footage of the first two girl’s murders have already been recovered, and though the killer’s face is masked and he never speaks, his striking blue eyes, skinny frame, and distinct posture resemble Chevalier closely enough for Montreal police to think the case is open-and-shut. True, the third girl’s snuff film is still missing. It’s arguably the one concrete ground of defense his lawyers have. But the brutality of the crimes and the killer’s physical similarities to Chevalier are enough for the prosecution to feel confident in their case. All of this information is conveyed in one shot, as the camera slowly turns and zooms through the crowd until it lands on one.
The only portion of the public convinced poor Ludovic is innocent are a crowd of women who line up each morning before the sun rises to try and nab a seat in the courtroom gallery. They’re conspiracy theorists, ready and eager to go before news cameras and speak with feverish conviction about circumstantial evidence and deepfake technology, depleting their savings and their sanity to pick apart the hoax against Chevalier perpetrated by all of Montreal. The parents of the murder girls shame them for their disrespectful behavior and the harassing phone calls alleging their children are alive and sequestered away in another town. In short, they’re a menace, armchair detectives wielding true crime terminology to call in on week-night talk shows and act like they know anything.
Although Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariepy) sits next to these women in the back of the gallery, it’s not clear if she considers herself one of them. A model who pays for meals with BitCoin won in online poker games and lives a comfortable walk from the court in her spartan high-rise, Kelly-Anne watches the trial with the detached, laser-focused intensity of a true voyeur. She never approaches reporters or groupies, cutting through the crowds with her head held high and her face aloof. Even as she strikes up an uneasy companionship with a groupie named Clementine (Laurie Babin), she never stoops to disparaging the lawyers or crying false evidence. She respects her enemies and refuses to take the risk of underestimating them. Sure, Kelly-Anne is absolutely rubbernecking off the lurid crimes Chevalier has committed, but her remoteness elevates her to a different league of predatory, watchful fascination than Clementine, rabid as she is. It’s not clear at first why she’s there, whose side she’s on or whose interests she’s serving.
Laying out these stakes so concretely for this review does a slight disservice to Plante’s film. Just as much information is communicated through imagery as through the script. Everything I’ve described in these dense opening paragraphs is shown and told at a steady, electric drip over the course of the film’s first hour. Red Rooms operates on electromagnetic waves, distributing sensory information alongside purely animalistic convections of emotion. Dominique Plante’s score embodies these tones with creative orchestrations, going from very contemporary electronica to violent percussions, control and impulse woven and disspelled through a sickening beat.
Red Rooms is uncommonly good at withholding, using the cinematic powers of suggestion to make us ask some scary questions about Kelly-Anne and the folks she’s circling without teasing an easy resolution. So rarely have I watched a film and wondered with perplexed, terrified curiosity about what a central character might do from one scene to the next. What does she expect of Clementine when she lets her in on a very little secret? How far will her interest in one dead girl and her mother go, and what will come of it? Never has the flash of a camera inside a dark room yielded such ugly disrespect for the dead,
Gariepy’s performance is crucial to achieving this sense of dangerous possibility, going even farther than Plante’s script to suggest an unfathomable psychology.Gariep’s physicality is frighteningly controlled, allowing the tiniest tremors imply a great deal about Kelly-Anne’s inner machinations. When she loosens her movements, Gariepy is terrifying - even expressions of recognizable human emotions like giddy joy and skin-crawling fear feel genuinely evil. Snuff films don’t deserve fangirling adulation. Not always do I need a character’s job to fit whatever life they’re living in the main meat of a film, but Kelly-Anne’s career as a model is folded quite miraculously into the characterization. This is a woman who’s made a living on being watched, maintaining incredible control over her body language and facial expressiveness to become an art object. Now she’s performing the role of the watcher, and her roving eyes and steely movements conceal something ravenous and fatalistic.
Neither the actress or the film speak the nature of Kelly-Anne’s perverse attachments out loud. A ghoulish cosplay act - one of the year’s most disturbing sequences - underlines a connection that puts her motivations directly in conversation with the morbid fetishism that pervades De Palma’s The Black Dahlia. I also spent a lot of my second trip through Red Rooms thinking of Longlegs, how both films take on era-specific boogeymen around young children in peril and elevate them to almost folkloric tales of predation, via directorial conviction and unconventional style. But where Longlegs buckles a lot in its final leg, Red Rooms manages to become tighter and less predictable as Kelly-Anne hurls herself closer and closer to the sun. I’m still torn about the very last scene, which tidies up a lot of loose ends without resolving the fate of one key character, but it’s worth debating, and the film’s many, many virtues are worth testing yourself against. Maybe it’s not “horror” like your The First Omens or In a Violent Natures, but nothing, nothing is as nauseating as Red Rooms.
