RED ROOMS - Mark Reviews Movies

Red Rooms, Utopia

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 5, 2024

Fear of the dark is almost certainly an evolutionary defense mechanism. We fear it, because something—anything—could be in the shadows, and an unseen threat is far more dangerous than an observed one. Another element of human nature, though, compels us toward the darkness. After all, we don't know what the shadows do or do not contain until we look. Red Rooms exists in that contradiction of human dread and curiosity, and that makes this combination of tecno-thriller, courtroom drama, and character study a uniquely chilling film.

The darkness here is human. It has a face. It has a name. It is a man, accused of and standing trial for the crimes of murdering three teenage girls. These are no ordinary killings, though, if murder can be called "ordinary" in the first place. No, this man abducted these girls at different times, held them captive, physically tortured and sexually assaulted them, and, finally, ended their lives by such brutal methods that one doesn't even want to describe them.

He didn't just do all of this, though. This murderer also recorded his crimes, streaming them live for paying customers on the dark web. He made twisted entertainment of torture and murder, and people watched.

Part of writer/director Pascal Plante's film takes place in the courtroom, as the prosecution's opening statement puts forth the facts of the case and explains the evidence they have against the accused, who sits in a glass cell in the courtroom. Occasionally the camera finds him, calmly sitting with his legs and arms crossed, as his face expresses no emotion, even when the prosecution points the finger directly at him.

The defense counters that all of the evidence provided by the government will be circumstantial, since the man in the video wore a mask and, given the anonymity of the platform where the killings were streamed, there is nothing tangible to connect the accused with the murders. Plante's camera is passive in these opening moments, simply observing the proceedings, the speakers, the man in the glass cell, and those watching the trial. There's a distancing effect to this approach—one that makes this scene a matter of cold, unfeeling procedure.

In the midst of it, though, are two mysteries. The first, of course, is the matter of the crimes themselves. The second is the identity and motivation of Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy).

We follow her into the courtroom, after she spent some portion of the night sleeping in a nearby alleyway to guarantee a seat, and as the state and defense cases are put forward, Plante's camera finally focuses its attention on this young woman, watching the trial and finally locking her gaze on Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), the man accused of butchering three girls.

Kelly-Anne is a puzzle—and a compelling one, at that. She has two jobs: a model and a professional online poker player. Why is she in the courtroom, and why is she so determined to be there that she would sleep on the street to do so? Her apartment is a fine one in a Montreal skyrise with a beautiful view, but she has no interest in the space, which contains almost no furniture and even fewer pieces of decoration, or the view, since her back is regularly to it or the curtains are drawn shut.

This woman literally lives in the darkness and, more than that, is comfortable in it. Upon returning home after the trial, she enters her home and keeps the lights off. The only illumination comes the glow of her computer monitors, where she plays poker and researches the crimes, the accused, the victims, their families, and news coverage of the trial. Kelly-Anne is obsessed, and the rest of the film slowly picks apart that fascination and keeps us wondering what's behind it until the final moments of this story.

The path to that revelation is constantly engaging on multiple levels. There's the trial itself, to which Kelly-Anne returns each and every day with the same unflappable look, and the horrifying evidence submitted by the prosecutor (played by Natalie Tannous) and sometimes objected to by the defense attorney (played by Pierre Chagnon).

There are scenes of Kelly-Anne at her apartment, staring at her screens as Plante uses the information on the monitors to track the character's routines, investigation into the crimes, and, eventually, trips to the same dark web where the killer publicized his barbarism. Technology here isn't simply a gimmick, because the filmmaker understands that, for someone as knowledgeable of and invested in the internet as Kelly-Anne is, it can be a window into a person's mind.

Plante finds an intrinsic tension in simply tracing Kelly-Anne's online activity, because we can see what she's doing, as she digs deeper into the murders and the victims and one of the grieving families, but don't understand why she's doing it. Is it morbid inquisitiveness or something beyond that?

Could it be that Kelly-Anne is like Clementine (Laurie Babin), a "groupie" of Chevalier who believes the man is innocent, simply because she sees some kindness in his eyes? The two women become friends of sorts, spending more and more time together during the downtime of the trial, and there is an obvious connection between them. Do they share the same opinion about Chevalier or just some sense of loneliness that has nothing to do with the killings? The course of that bond is fascinating, especially in what it ultimately reveals about the limits of curiosity about these dark matters for each of these women—when the truth of the murders becomes more than just grisly descriptions.

As much as Plante does show in terms of the trial and Kelly-Anne's private investigatory work, Red Rooms is particularly intelligent in what and how it withholds information, from keeping the killings off-screen (The audio is more than enough) to the foundational enigma of what Kelly-Anne is doing. The whole of the film, then, exists in the shadows, and whether the protagonist's actions are for good or ill or something in between, we can't help but be curious about and unsettled by what she does and what that reveals about her.

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