Sometimes, the word ‘myth’ is more a safety blanket than the definition of an agreed-upon story based on belief. It’s what we used to come up with in ancient times to explain natural phenomena or things such as luck and fate. In recent times, thanks to the rise of places like Reddit and Discord along with the many social media platforms, myths have taken a turn for the disturbing. Roped in with conspiracy theories and deep fakes, myths have now become stories we hope aren’t true (just look at the many Creepypastas or the countless Slender Man and Chernobyl ghost pictures posted online daily). Thing is you have to spend most of your time online for them to truly latch on to you.
Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms is based on one of these new ‘it better not be true’ myths: the titular red rooms, dark web sites where users can pay in cryptocurrency to see killers butcher innocent people. It’s a popular online myth which also was also explored in Ed Piskor’s ultraviolent Red Room comics, which more closely followed in the footsteps of French extreme horror cinema. In Plante’s case, the result is a terrifying movie about the potential of human depravity that speaks more about those who seek it online than those who create that type of content for consumption.
The movie follows a model called Kelly-Anne (played by Juliette Gariépy), a woman that’s obsessed with the trial of a serial killer called Ludovic Chevalier (stoically played by Maxwell McCabe-Lokos) who is charged with the murder and mutilation of three young girls. The case has shaken the city of Montreal given the nature of the killings. Each was recorded in their entirety and released on the dark web for purchase.
Kelly-Anne is quickly established as a person that essentially lives online, diving into all aspects of the trial to the point of digging up the personal information of one of the victims’ mothers by scouring through news reports and profile trackers. Early on, Kelly-Anne meets a fellow obsessive fan in Clémentine (played by Laurie Babin), a more intense version of herself that seems to be in love with Chevalier despite only having seen him on TV. This isn’t necessarily the case with Kelly-Anne. Her fixation is kept under wraps for almost the entirety of the movie. The reveal, though, is decisive enough that it will either make or break the movie for some viewers.
At a surface level, Red Rooms seems to be all about obsession in the digital age, and it is to an extent. But what it really wants to get at is how that type of obsession might lead users to completely disregard offline existence to effectively live in an always-online reality. It’s an enticing argument that Plante pulls off well by showing Kelly-Anne relying more on her phone and computer than on more tangible things as the story unravels.
To hit this point home, Plante shows Kelly-Anne devoting less and less time to her offline life as the trial progresses. Her exercise routine, one of her sources of income, her daily intake of information, her daily calendar, they all come from a digital source. All she really needs from the real world is sustenance, little else. In a sense, what Red Rooms chronicles is the process through which someone leaves the physical world behind in favor of one ruled by tech. It’s like watching the slow death of one state of being for the rise of another.
It makes for a grueling watch thanks to Juliette Gariépy’s performance as Kelly-Anne. She approaches the character with a sense of static intensity that reveals little about her actual motivations other than the fact they revolve around Chevalier’s case. Something is writhing inside her and it keeps the audience guessing as to what it might be.
At times it seems that she’s infatuated with the killer. At others she gives the impression she’s just morbidly curious and quite taken by the prospect of getting to watch the videos Chevalier made of his killings. Gariépy holds tight to her character’s secrets, a decision that really helps to establish a kind of ambiguity that invites speculation.
In fact, Kelly-Anne’s subdued emotional expressions and her taut body language are what make the movie so unsettling, especially as the serial killer elements take a back seat for character work to push the narrative. It’s here that the movie will either satisfy or disappoint. Plante reveals as little as possible throughout the film only to pull the curtain back on almost the entire mystery that is Kelly-Anne in the last stretch. It changes the meaning of the movie and can feel like a copout when taking into account how Kelly-Anne’s ambiguity accounts for so much of the pointed themes the film works with. All of a sudden, a sense of morality is ushered in and it takes over everything, dampening the impact of some of the character’s previous behavior.
It’s all sudden, too. Subtlety and nuance seem to get thrown out the window for a finale that leaves little room for interpretation (something the movie had invited audiences to indulge in for most of the runtime). As such, things that were initially disturbing end up losing a bit of that power because of how aggressively they got repurposed. Had it kept the things that drive Kelly-Anne unexplained, it would’ve cut deeper.
Red Rooms is an impressive showcase of mystery. It doesn’t rely on gore or gruesome kill scenes to establish a pitch-black tone that lingers. It’s not a procedural nor is it a serial killer movie the likes of Se7en or Zodiac (like some trailers are making out to be). It’s a character study that should’ve left a lot more questions unanswered to really leave a mark.
