By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Continuing our interview that begins here, RUE MORGUE delves further into the psychological thriller RED ROOMS with its writer/director, Pascal Plante. Now on VOD and still playing select theaters from Utopia, the Quebecois French-language film stars Juliette Gariépy and Laurie Babin as Kelly-Anne and Clementine, two women who are both obsessed in different ways with Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), who is on trial in Montreal for torturing and murdering three teenage girls in a livestreamed “red room” on the dark web. Thoroughly gripping and often chilling as it probes its protagonists’ fascination with Chevalier’s crimes without explicating or judging them, RED ROOMS is a compellingly fresh take on oft-explored subject matter.
Ludovic Chevalier is a much less showy character than a lot of screen serial killers, who are often diabolical geniuses. Is he based on any particular real-life murderers?
Oh, no–we didn’t want to give any more publicity to people who I think shouldn’t have any. And they all have their own Netflix shows anyway, so why would I? Of course, if you think Montreal and a video of a murder, there might be one that pops into your mind from about 12 years ago, but that’s so different from ours. I don’t want to name him, but it was a very narcissistic crime, whereas in the film it’s very banal, it’s almost supply and demand: He’s going to give the people what they want.
You know, I don’t like the ending of PSYCHO, where they go into depth psychoanalyzing Norman Bates’ evil mind. PSYCHO is amazing all the way to those last five minutes, and I really didn’t want to go there. I think we overindulge in that in fiction, and docs even. We go to many lengths to try and understand and justify crazy behavior with traumas from the past. I didn’t want that for the protagonist of RED ROOMS, and I also didn’t want that for Chevalier. That keeps the riddle more alive, and makes it scarier, I believe. He’s just a face in the crowd, someone who could be your neighbor.
I have to ask: Is he named after Maurice Chevalier, who sang “Thank Heaven for Little Girls”?
[Laughs] That’s a good one! No, but someone did bring that up once, and it’s so cringe, that number! But no, not really. The name Ludovic is an inside joke, because my cousin is a lawyer, and he helped me as a consultant, so I named the killer Ludovic after him. But Chevalier does have meaning; in French, it means “knight,” and that’s all tied to what I wanted to create with the character of Kelly-Anne and what she might be into. She’s into Arthurian legends, medieval romanticism, but very dark; not medieval in a cheesy, LARPing kind of way. It’s more like the way I’m moved by paintings from the 1100s. There’s usually a sense of the divine being there, but you have people being impaled or people dying and things like that, and the sense of perspective is usually very flat. I love all that stuff, and it made sense that Kelly-Anne does too.
What motivated your decision to shoot RED ROOMS in close to a square-screen aspect ratio?
It’s a 3:2 ratio, so it’s a bit wider than 4:3. But it’s definitely more confining than most formats for contemporary films; it’s not 16:9, and it’s definitely not scope. I actually explored the 3:2 ratio in my previous film, NADIA, BUTTERFLY, for drastically different reasons. The short, boring answer is that my brain works well with that ratio. I love filming two-shots where people are very close to each other, and so with that ratio, not too wide, you don’t have any extra space. It’s not a film about the scenery, it’s not about the interior decoration; it’s very much about the protagonists. By being a bit more narrow, you entrap your characters a little bit.
I didn’t want to use 4:3, because that usually evokes something retro, and RED ROOMS is definitely not retro. It’s very hi-fi, the density of the image, and the Sony Venice camera we used. 3:2 is also a photographic ratio, so it makes sense for Kelly-Anne, being a model. We see that ratio in photos all the time, but in cinema, you kind of have to invent it, because in film it doesn’t exist. Actually, with the Sony Venice, the native ratio–which most people crop with letterboxing–is 3:2. So we shot that full-frame native image of the camera, and that was what we used.
Over the course of showing RED ROOMS at festivals, have you ever been approached by actual serial-killer or true-crime groupies?
Oh man, I did–only once where a person actually came up to us, though. I’m not going to name the festival–it was in Europe, let’s just say that–but it’s actually a good thing we had that conversation, and I think the point of view of the film felt safe enough that this woman could approach the producer and I at the end of the film. She told us, “I’m trying to have empathy with the victims,” so she was aware that this is kind of wrong, but she also said, “I’m obsessed with their minds, I want to understand how they work.” A lot of people have obsessions; this is a dark one, but it is realistic enough. So we had kind of an intense conversation, but it came out well.
So maybe that goes to show what I was saying, that I’m not trying to judge the people themselves, I’m trying to understand what creates this behavior. Because it is widespread; you can go on Facebook and see a support group for virtually any killer you like. It’s not even censored content at this point. It’s too common for us to be like, “Yeah, they’re all crazy people”; it’s way more than that. And also, the film considers the media apparatus, because the media, in a way, creates the rock stars that the killers end up becoming–the Netflixes of this world and all that. The more we mythologize these killers, the more that will create fans. People are attracted to power, and if you put these killers on that big, weird pedestal where they have the power of life and death over others, of course you’re going to have people becoming intrigued, at the very least, or obsessed by them.
Are you working on any movies right now?
I am–two actually. During the pandemic, starting in 2020, I was also writing another project entirely, something even more ambitious than RED ROOMS. It’s a period film, set in the 17th century, kind of folk horror but not entirely horror. I put that screenplay aside to do RED ROOMS, but now I’m picking it up again and we’re getting it on the rails. It’s shaping up very well. And this year, I also started working on something new that is in the early stages. I have a version of the screenplay, but it still needs work; it’s about a fictional pop star, so these two are very different.
