Film Review: Red Rooms
OUR MORAL STASIS
Digging up turpitude from the deep recesses of dark web opportunism, Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms is a serial killer thriller that finds power in its restraint and shocking prescience: an evil — yet vital — film to understand the stranglehold of postmodern, screen-abetted detachment. Juliette Gariépy’s chilling performance is a roundhouse kick to the teeth to dismantle our culture of macabre obsession, parasocial madness, and growing numbness. Minor spoilers ahead…
A former teen pop star’s death sends a shuttle of freelancer paps to take photos while the body is still warm; within hours, images from TMZ have over a billion eyes on them. Ryan Murphy’s new Menendez Brothers series, the second season of Monster, mines the most salacious, tabloid untruths for sensationalist drama. “[The Menendez Brothers] should be sending me flowers,” gloats the showrunner. Postmodern capital has not only exploited our rubbernecking isolation, but crowded out our stimulation towards pernicious pathologies: a growing chasm of apathy and detachment matched only by our Internet bandwidth. When and where but now and in our feeds, behind our screens, can we find cam rips of Terrifier 3 side-by-side with real-life images of children being annihilated by war crimes? And are we so inured to ignore the difference? Our ever-flattening consumption has given us a new, default mode: one of a moral stasis ever-straddling the evaporating line between our hunger for spectacle and our ability to view violence as real and victims as humans.
Enter Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms, perhaps 2024’s most essential reading of our parasocial obsessions within the social media simulacra. The sinister figure at the center of the film is notorious serial killer Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos); nicknamed “The Demon of Rosemont,” Chevalier is on trial for his slow, sadistic murders of teenage girls, broadcast and streamed for profit on the dark web in the titular “red rooms.” However, to call Red Rooms a serial killer thriller would be a misnomer: Plante is interested not in murderers and their psychology, but rather in those infatuated with them. The movie finds a dark, frightening mirror to reality with Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), a blank, statuesque model-by-day whose fixation on Chevalier begins every morning at dawn as she lines up outside the courthouse for the trial gallery. Crashing out of the gate carrying a brazen display of Plante’s controlled formalism, Red Rooms begins with long takes of the prosecution’s opening statement in a sterile Quebecois courtroom. A slow pan of the camera lingers on barristers, the judge, and the jury as Chevalier’s alleged crimes are expounded in grisly detail, but it’s Kelly-Anne’s vacant expression - a reflection of modern unreadability and stone-faced fascination - that draws the most attention. Is she an admirer? Is she repulsed? Red Rooms ultimately doesn’t really care; Kelly-Anne wants more.
“Postmodern capital has not only exploited our rubbernecking isolation, but crowded out our stimulation towards pernicious pathologies…”
In a stroke of brilliance, Red Rooms pairs Kelly-Anne with another Chevalier obsessive, Clémentine (Laurie Babin): a conspiracy peddler that finds “kindness” in the murderer’s eyes, utterly convinced that he is innocent of his crimes. Gregarious and scrutable in every way Kelly-Anne is not, Clémentine at first fills the role as a different breed of serial killer groupie, but quickly transmutes into something different entirely: a symbol of the lines that Kelly-Anne is willing to not only cross, but obliterate. Hacking personal information from grieving parents, old-fashioned breaking and entering, and bidding in dark web auctions for a fabled missing “red room” video, Kelly-Anne falls deeper down the rabbit hole of her own consumption, graduating from sideline enthusiast to insidious interloper. It’s here that Red Rooms’ neat facade - much like its protagonist’s iron-willed steeliness - begins to crumble: reality bleeds, formal control slips, and Dominique Plante’s baroque score destabilizes into discordant soundscapes, all climaxing with a jaw-dropping cosplay jaunt that is perhaps one of the most sickening acts of non-physical violence ever committed to film. By design, Red Rooms’ restraint never allows it to fall into complicity of the apparatus it’s trying to critique; for a movie about gruesome murders captured on video for gawking pleasure, there’s almost no gore present. Instead, Plante finds the most unsettling excavations of our unfeeling voyeur culture, and for every temptation to wag the finger at our terminally-online zeitgeist, the movie stays surprisingly true to its turbulent, impenetrable interiority.
Red Rooms immediately reminds me of the real-life Ken & Barbie murders of the early 90s in Canada: a series of rapes and killings that were sensationalized partially because of the videos of the victims filmed by the perpetrators. What made the case so interesting, however, was that the footage was so heinous that it was incinerated by the courts, even amidst appeal, for the sake of the families. Red Rooms is a warped - but hardly exaggerated - mirror to our present where this kind of civility has all but fallen away, replaced by digital numbness and hollow hearts. When Kelly-Anne sits on a victim’s bed to snap a selfie, the picture that eventually develops isn’t of her empty, rictus smile, but of our own insatiable, consumerist maw.
