‘Red Rooms’ review: Austere giallo for our tech-detached age

She’s a fashion model! She’s a computer genius! She’s got dark obsessions that have her fixated upon a serial killer! In the 1960s or ’70s, these fantastical beats would’ve made for a swank giallo film – meaning that Italian subset of slashers that are all loose morals and leather gloves (think Dario Argento or Mario Bava). But nowadays, what we get instead is Red Rooms (Les Chambres rouges), Quebecois director Pascal Plante’s deliciously lurid courtroom drama cum techno thriller which opened Montreal’s 2023 Fantasia Film Festival.

Red Rooms gives one hell of a star-making role to relative newcomer Juliette Gariépy as our gorgeous and disturbed model slash tech detective. As Kelly-Anne, she’s an enigma wrapped in avant-garde high fashion in front of the camera (her agent says, “Weird is her thing”) who opts for inconspicuous blacks and grays at home. Kelly-Anne can turn it up to one hundred and fifty when the flashbulbs pop, but everything about her home life seems nondescript — her apartment is a sterile box perched high in the Montreal sky, and she seems to have no friends or family to speak of. Not even a plant!

What she does have is her obsession with “The Demon of Rosemont,” a serial killer who’s been butchering teen girls and broadcasting it on the dark web to the highest bidders. The red rooms of the film’s title indicate both the internet forums where these videos are broadcast, as well as the physical locations themselves where these snuff films are made – the latter literally turning red with blood as their awful proceedings play out. 

But Kelly-Anne is hardly alone in this fixation – it’s a case that’s captured the attention of the world, the sort of snuff films that long seemed the stuff of Hostel-like fiction finally being proven all too terrifyingly real. And like Kelly-Anne, no one can look away, especially now that there’s a suspect on trial. 

Everything seems to indicate that Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos from Stanleyville) is the murderer behind the black ski mask seen on the videos – videos that only took a small matter of time to leak beyond the confines of their original rarified chat rooms into the wider world’s web. Much to the horror of the murdered girls’ families, and to everyone with a conscience…Not that half of those people don’t want a peek anyway. As Chevalier’s trial begins, the judge warns the jurors they should leave immediately if they’re not prepared to witness awful things, and not a single one of them stirs.

Red Rooms is a courtroom drama of darkest inclinations.

But the full scope of the case is anything but cut-and-dry. For one, there’s the question of the number of victims, as two of the snuff videos have leaked online but the mutilated remains of three girls were found on Chevalier’s property.  And it should be noted that we see no violence on-screen, but we do hear it, and we hear truly horrible actions described in lingering, clinical detail. Which is almost always worse? When a filmmaker trusts their audience to fill in the details, our imaginations become the grimmest kind of devils.

The mother of the youngest victim, Francine (Elisabeth Locas), has become the face of the families in the courtroom and in the media. Her emotional pleas to the press for information have captured everyone’s heart, even as Plante — through Kelly-Anne’s gaze — wanders dangerously, thrillingly, toward finding Francine’s showmanship itself somewhat distasteful. She seems almost too distraught that there is no snuff film showcasing her daughter’s final moments? Clearly, this is not a film unwilling to probe at unsettling impulses.

Francine also vociferously makes her disgust with the serial killer groupies who attend every court session well known to any microphone that will listen. And yes, Kelly-Anne is indeed one of those groupies. When she’s not posing in haute couture or winning piles of bitcoin in online poker games, she’s sleeping in an alleyway behind the courthouse so she can be the first in line to watch the proceedings live and in person. And she sits riveted to every micro-expression on Chevalier’s bored, expressionless face.

But what is she watching for? Plante’s direction and script and Gariépy’s performance all steadfastly refuse to let us know what is motivating Kelly-Anne’s bizarre fixation. Does she know Chevalier? Is she in love with him or trying to solve the case? As sure as the press and the prosecution are that they got their man, the murderer is masked in the videos; the defense very well might have its reasonable doubt. The eyes seem like his, but is that enough?

All facets of true crime come under the microscope.

Clementine (Laurie Babin) is one of the other young women who attends the proceedings as religiously as Kelly-Anne does, and she is convinced Chevalier is innocent. She, too, is willing to weaponize the press, ranting outside of court every day to every camera about due process and doctored videos. As a contrast to Kelly-Anne’s austere reserve, Clementine couldn’t be more different. And so when the two women strike up a tentative friendship, we’re forced to wonder if Kelly-Anne agrees with Clementine; she assumes the role of devil’s advocate in their conversations, but only mildly so. 

Inscrutable as she might be, Kelly-Anne seems drawn to any kind of extreme behavior. But she’s like an alien observer looking into it – “it” being humanity, emotion, a firm 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 benefits her in poker and online sleuthing as well. It seems as if she can hack anything, seeing ways through the ones and zeroes that the rest of us would never. Indeed, the slow build of Kelly-Anne’s long game is masterfully unfurled by Plante, and as we watch the pieces slap into place, it’s truly some of the greatest use of the internet and its disturbing possibilities that I’ve ever witnessed on-screen. 

It all comes back to our killer leading lady.

The role of Kelly-Anne is a whopper of one; it’s the sort of complicated (one might even say “unlikeable”) role that actresses live for, and which hardly ever seem to come along. The only recent U.S. correlation I can think of is what David Fincher and Rooney Mara did with the significantly underrated The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and even Lisbeth Salander would tell Kelly-Anne to take it down a notch.

And Juliette Gariépy gives a coolly masterful turn, threading through every derangement little shockwaves of life and humor where you’d usually expect to see a more clinical, atypical touch. She keeps surprising, scene to scene, millisecond to millisecond, just as you get the feeling that Kelly-Anne is surprising herself just as much. Gariépy is somehow totally in control of a person totally out of control, but in an extremely controlled fashion. 

And where Plante finally lands us, and Kelly-Anne, has to be seen, jaw agape, to be believed. Red Rooms is very good at digging its finger around under the skin of everybody’s salacious relationship with true crime – the media, the public, the law itself – and spilling out our most untoward compulsions across the floor like so much crimson splatter. Like those giallo films of yore, it can be pulpy and silly; Kelly-Anne remains a gorgeous model slash brilliant computer hacker, after all. But in its bigness, it approaches an almost operatic truth, finding equal measures of perversity on both sides of justice’s scales.

Red Rooms was reviewed out of its North American premiere at Fantasia Film Festival 2023.