Red Rooms review: raw giallo for our age without technology

She’s a model! She is a computer genius! He has dark obsessions that make him focus on a serial killer! In the 1960s and 1970s, these fantastic rhythms would have been elegant giallo film – that is, the Italian subset of slashers that rely on loose morals and leather gloves (think Dario Argento or Mario Bava). But these days, instead, we get what is Red Rooms (Les Chambres roses)Quebec director Pascal Plante’s wonderfully bleak courtroom drama, a techno thriller that opened the 2023 Montreal Fantasia Film Festival.

Red Rooms gives one hell of a star turn to relative newcomer Juliette Gariépy as our beautiful and disturbed model slash-tech detective. As Kelly-Anne, she is an enigma in front of the camera, wrapped in avant-garde fashion (her agent says: “It’s her quirk”), who chooses inconspicuous black and gray at home. Kelly-Anne can turn it up to a hundred and fifty when the flashbulbs go off, but everything about her home life seems bland – her apartment is a sterile box perched high in the Montreal sky, and she doesn’t seem to have any friends or family to hang out with talk to. It’s not even a plant!

What is she? does her obsession is the “Demon of Rosemont”, a serial killer who murders teenage girls and broadcasts it on the dark web to the highest bidders. The red rooms in the film’s title indicate both the online forums where these films are broadcast and the actual physical locations where these snuff films are shot – the latter literally turning red with blood as their terrible events unfold.

But Kelly-Anne is not alone in this fixation – it’s a case that has captured the world’s attention, and snuff films that have long seemed to be the mainstream Shelter-like fiction, finally proven to be all too terrifyingly real. And like Kelly-Anne, no one can look away, especially now that the suspects are on trial.

Everything indicates that Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos z Stanleyville) is the killer behind the black ski mask seen in the videos – videos that took only a short while to leak beyond the confines of their original, sophisticated chat rooms and into the wider global web. To the horror of the families of the murdered girls and everyone with a conscience… At least not half of these people don’t want to look. At the beginning of Chevalier’s trial, the judge warns the jurors to leave immediately if they are not prepared to witness terrible things, and none of them move.

Red Rooms is a courtroom drama with the darkest tendencies.

But the full scope of this case is anything but simple. Firstly, there is the issue of the number of victims, as two snuff videos were leaked on the Internet, but the mutilated remains of three girls were found on Chevalier’s estate. And it should be noted that we don’t see the violence on screen, but we do hear it, and we hear truly terrible acts described in long, clinical detail. Which is almost always worse? When a filmmaker trusts the audience to fill in the details, our imaginations become the worst kind of devil.

The mother of the youngest victim, Francine (Elisabeth Locas), became the face of the families in the courtroom and in the media. Her emotional pleas to the press for information won everyone’s hearts, even as Plante – through Kelly-Anne’s eyes – wanders dangerously and thrillingly, even to finding Francine’s performance itself a bit distasteful. She seems almost too distraught that there is no snuff film showing her daughter’s final moments? Clearly, this is not a film that refuses to explore disturbing impulses.

The best stories to mash

Francine also vocally expresses her disgust for the serial killer fangirls who attend every court hearing, well known to any microphone that will listen. And yes, Kelly-Anne is indeed one of those fans. When she’s not posing in haute couture or winning stacks of bitcoins in online poker games, she sleeps in an alley behind the courthouse so she can be first in line to watch the proceedings live and in person. She sits transfixed by every micro expression on Chevalier’s bored, expressionless face.

But why is she looking? Plante’s direction and screenplay, as well as Gariépy’s performance, adamantly keep us from knowing what motivates Kelly-Anne’s strange fixation. Does she know Chevalier? Is she in love with him or is she trying to solve the case? Although the press and the prosecutor’s office are sure that they have caught their man, in the video recordings the murderer is masked; the defense may have reasonable doubts. The eyes look like his, but is that enough?

All aspects of true crime are under the microscope.

Clementine (Laurie Babin) is one of the other young women who attend the trial as religiously as Kelly-Anne, and is convinced that Chevalier is innocent. She, too, is willing to weaponize the press, complaining daily to every camera about due process and fake videos. Unlike Kelly-Anne’s stern reserve, Clementine couldn’t be more different. So when the two women strike up a tentative friendship, we are forced to wonder whether Kelly-Anne agrees with Clementine; he plays the role of devil’s advocate in their conversations, but only to a small extent.

Although Kelly-Anne is inscrutable, she seems to be attracted to all kinds of extreme behavior. But she is like an alien observer looking on – “it” is humanity, emotion, a strong stance in any direction. The adaptability that makes her an excellent model seems to have hung her out to dry in real life, but her dispassion also serves her in poker and online detective work. It seems like he can hack anything by looking through 1s and 0s, something the rest of us could never do. Indeed, the slow build of Kelly-Anne’s long game has been masterfully developed by Plante, and as we watch the pieces fall into place, we can see that this is truly one of the best uses of the Internet and its disturbing possibilities that ever seen on screen.

It all comes down to our leading lady killer.

Kelly-Anne’s role is amazing; it’s the kind of complicated (you might even say “unlikeable”) role that actresses live for and that almost never appears. The only recent U.S. correlation I can think of is what David Fincher and Rooney Mara did to vastly underrated values Girl with a dragon tattooand even Lisbeth Salander told Kelly-Anne to lower it a bit.

Juliette Gariépy delivers a cool, masterful turn, tearing through every disorder, the little shockwaves of life and humor where one might normally expect a more clinical, offbeat touch. She continues to surprise, scene by scene, millisecond by millisecond, just as you feel Kelly-Anne surprises herself. Gariépy somehow completely controls a person completely out of control, but in an extremely controlled way.

And where Plante and Kelly-Anne will eventually land us will have to be slack-jawed to be seen to be believed. Red Rooms he’s very good at digging under the skin of everyone’s salacious connection to true crime – the media, the public, the law itself – and scattering our most inappropriate compulsions across the floor like a scarlet stain. Like those giallo films of yore, it can be pulpy and silly; After all, Kelly-Anne remains a gorgeous model and a brilliant computer hacker. But in its grandeur it approaches almost operatic truth, finding equal measures of perversion on both sides of the scale of justice.

Red Rooms can now be watched on demand via Apple TV+.

UPDATE: October 2, 2024 2:24 PM EDT Red Rooms review was from the North American premiere at the Fantasia Film Festival 2023. This review was originally published on July 29, 2023. It has been updated to reflect the digital version.