Red Rooms: A Horror Movie Review by Hope Madden
Kelly-Anne is obsessed with the high-profile case of a serial killer, and reality blurs with her morbid fantasies. She goes down a dark path to get the missing video of the murder of a young girl, to whom Kelly-Anne bears a disturbing resemblance.
Release date: 11 August 2023 (Canada)
Director: Pascal Plante
Red Rooms
True crime culture. Serial killer groupies. The Dark Web. Does all of it seem too grim, too of-the-moment, too cliché to make for a deeply affecting thriller these days?
Au contraire, mon frère. Québécois Pascal Plante makes nimble use of these elements to craft a nailbiter of a serial killer thriller with his latest effort, Red Rooms.
What is a Red Room? It’s a dark web chamber where you can watch the kind of thing Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos) is accused of doing. You don’t want to see what goes on there (and thankfully Plante does not subject us to it). Instead, we stalk Chevalier’s trial day after day with Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy, astonishing).
But what is this model and online poker player doing sleeping in an alley just to get in line early enough to claim one of the few peanut gallery seats available for this, Quebec’s trial of the decade?
The enigma of Kelly-Anne—and Gariépy’s meticulous performance—becomes the gravitational pull in Plante’s riveting thriller. What is she doing and why is she doing it? Is she good or bad? Should we be worried about Clementine (Laurie Babin, a perfect dose of tenderness against Gariépy’s cool delivery), the down-and-out groupie Kelly-Anne takes in?
Plante expertly braids vulnerability and psychopathy, flesh and glass, humanity and the cyber universe. For a weirdly compelling peek at how easily one could slide from one world to the other.
His real magic trick—one that remarkably few filmmakers have pulled off—is generating edge-of-your-seat anxiety primarily with keyboard clicks, computer screens and wait times. But the tension Plante builds—thanks to Gariépy’s precise acting—is excruciating.
They keep you disoriented, fascinated, a little repulsed and utterly breathless.
Many filmmakers in the last few years—the number growing with the rise of internet culture and mushrooming since the pandemic—have sought to reflect the dehumanizing effect of isolation. Few have done so with such unerring results as Plante and Gariépy. And they spawned a stellar thriller in the process.
