If streaming numbers are anything to go buy, our collective fascination with serial killers and horrifying true crime has all but taken over our lives. People who find bloody action movies distasteful might spend hours every evening hearing about depraved and grisly murders in explicit detail and think nothing of it. It’s an odd fixation we collectively have. How could someone, your neighbor or coworker, do something so heinous? That fixation and central question lies at the heart of Red Rooms one of the most upsetting and pulse-pounding thrillers I’ve seen in a long time.
Red Rooms garnered festival acclaim in 2023 and, as with many smaller titles, finally gets a wider release this year. Writer-director Pascal Plante focuses on the kinds of people—young women in this case—who become obsessed with serial killer cases and even in some instances become infatuated by the accused monsters. His lead character Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) and her motivations are so unknowable and seemingly disturbed and disturbing, and yet so fascinating, that we can’t take our eyes off of her.
The story revolves around the trial of accused serial murderer Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos). He is suspected of not only the brutal torture and murder of three school girls but of filming his actions. Those tapes went to the highest bidder on the dark web, in so-called Red Rooms. Only two of the videos have surfaced, to screen in the courtroom. While the media has roundly decided Chevalier is guilty, reasonable doubt makes the trial less open-and-shut.
Kelly-Anne, a model and Montreal local, camps out every morning in order to secure a seat in the courtroom to hear all the gory details and observe the accused in the stocks and the families of the victims. Kelly-Anne lives an otherwise modest existence. She’s a fashion model, yes, but her apartment is small and sparse. She spends most of her free time either playing racquetball alone or surfing the dark web. We soon learn she is obsessed with finding the final murder video, but to what end we don’t know.
Not long into her routine she meets Clementine (Laurie Babin), a young runaway who made her way to Montreal for the trial with next to nothing but a strong belief in Chevalier’s innocence. Despite herself, Kelly-Anne starts spending time with Clementine and the two spark a very strained friendship. Has Clementine found an ally in Kelly-Anne? Or is Kelly-Anne merely using Clementine’s fanaticism for her own strange purposes? Like with most everything in Red Rooms, Plante plays everything close to the vest.
We spend so much time with Kelly-Anne but, credit to Plante and to Gariépy’s incredible performance, we never get a sense of her true motivations. We don’t know if she believes in Chevalier’s innocence or is merely obsessed with the crimes themselves. Or if she believes he did it but idolizes him all the same. All we get are Kelly-Anne’s actions which go from confusing to troubling to downright shocking as the movie progresses. People throw around Taxi Driver whenever they talk about a lone, unhinged protagonist. While that’s apt here, the fact that this isn’t the “typical” creepy loner is part of what makes Red Rooms so compelling.
Plante displays some absolutely bravura filmmaking here. The film’s opening is a seven-minute unbroken shot of the two attorneys giving their opening statements to the jury. The camera floats around as we hear the depraved and horrendous fates of the three young victims. We get an absolute sense of the geography of the courtroom, the faces of the major players, before finally resting on Kelly-Anne’s stoic, unmoved face. It’s an amazing way to give us the circumstances, and to show us our protagonist’s unreadable expressions amid all of this horror.
The film also contains one of the tensest sequences of someone typing alone in their apartment I’ve ever seen. I won’t spoil what happens or why, but as the climax of the movie, Kelly-Anne going back and forth between illicit websites, and again the tremendous performance from Gariépy, is as breathlessly exciting as anything you’d find in a Mission: Impossible movie. One review from last year said Red Rooms “Out-Finchers Fincher” and this scene is exactly what they mean.
I think Red Rooms is an incredibly poignant and profoundly upsetting movie. I never thought a thriller about true crime junkies would be this effective, but I cannot stop thinking about it. I’m sure you won’t either.
Red Rooms is in limited release now. If you get a chance to see it, don’t miss it.
Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.