By MICHAEL GINGOLD
There have been countless serial-killer movies, but rarely does one come along that takes as unique and gripping an approach as writer/director Pascal Plante’s RED ROOMS (LES CHAMBRES ROUGES). Debuting today on VOD and still playing select theaters from Utopia, the multi-award-winning Quebecois, French-language film merges the true-crime and horror genres, and RUE MORGUE spoke to Plante in depth about its conception and creation.
At the center of RED ROOMS is the trial of Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), who has allegedly tortured and murdered three teenage girls in live-streamed “red rooms” on the dark web. Among the many Montreal citizens fascinated by the case is Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), a model who is fixated on Chevalier and his crimes, and begins to involve herself in the case on-line. At the same time, she meets and takes in teenaged Clementine (Laurie Babin), who is equally obsessed with Chevalier and certain he is innocent. Without judging or offering easy explanations for the two protagonists’ fascination with this man and the crimes, Plante weaves a compelling and chilling dual character study that also probes humanity’s fascination with the darkest depths of human behavior (see our review here).
What inspired you to take this approach to a serial-killer film?
I love thrillers, but I’m not specifically super-focused on them. Still, I’ve seen my share of them, and I’ve felt that the balance was kind of off, because they’re usually either about the investigation by the police or portraits of the killers themselves. During the pandemic more than ever, I came to feel there was a satellite microcosm that existed around them, and a widespread obsession with them. It seemed like there was a new true-crime show popping up every week, and we’re massively into watching them. I fell prey to that a little bit, but it’s never very nourishing for the soul, watching a four-hour doc about a murderer. I always felt kind of depleted afterward.
So I started doing more research, and the starting point was the phenomenon of the killer groupies. That vantage point felt like a fresh approach, an original approach, to the genre, having someone who is external to the case, and we follow her. The lead became female quickly, because the statistics speak for themselves. I’m not a psychoanalyst; even though I did a lot of research, it’s still a big riddle to me. As is the question of why it is that men mostly kill; why is gender even involved? So the character of Kelly-Anne shaped up first, and that led me down the rabbit hole of the dark web and the red rooms. It almost felt necessary to have an interactive crime in order for the protagonist to be more and more immersed in the main narrative.
Do you have any ideas about why people are so fascinated by true crime and serial killers, and did your point of view on that change over the course of making RED ROOMS?
My point of view evolved, but it didn’t drastically change; it’s a bit more well-defined. I believe there’s a biological component, going back to ancient Rome: People went to the Colosseum, and some of what they watched was gruesome. I was in the south of France not too long ago, and I went to the Nimes Colosseum, which is very well-preserved. And there was schedule of what would be a normal day at the Colosseum, which was basically an hour of prisoners being ripped apart by live animals, by tigers or something, and that was entertainment! So the human soul hasn’t changed. The tools have evolved, and now more than ever, if you have that blood thirst, you can access whatever it is you’re looking for.
The other biological component might be that you have to recognize danger in order to be able to avoid it in real life. Like, if there’s a bar fight or a car crash, people will just watch it. It might be tied to the fact that women, who are usually the prey of the male killers, are the ones who are more likely to watch true-crime shows, to binge that content. It feels counterintuitive, like sheep watching documentaries about wolves; maybe they want to know how they operate, in order to remain safe in their real lives. But there’s entertainment at play, which is what RED ROOMS is trying to critique and understand. Why is it that we seek that kind of content, and have that blood thirst? The idea was for people to expect the film to go into dangerous territory, to expect to maybe see blood and guts. That’s me playing with your hidden desires, and drawing you into that labyrinthian narrative.
On that note, you suggest what is on the murder videos, but you never actually show them.
Sure, but the sound is terrible. Sound is a powerful tool in cinema, and I’ve said this often: I’m not going easier on you by not showing them. They had to be horrible, those scenes, because at that point in the movie, we can divide the viewers into two categories. There are some people who want to see the videos, and some who are like, “Please, I really don’t want to see them!” And for those people, they don’t see them, but the scenes still mess with their heads. But for the people who do want to see the videos, I wanted them to feel their horror, and to wonder, “Why is it that I’m craving to see that?”
I’m not showing what’s on the videos, I’m showing something else that to me is way more interesting: There’s the two-shot of Kelly-Anne and Clementine watching, and to me it’s not about the content, it’s about the gaze of these two people. At this point, the film is distilled into, pick your character: Are you with Kelly-Anne, being almost entertained and stoic, or do you cling more to Clementine? That contrast felt way more interesting than seeing a 14-year-old being ripped open.
You don’t really go into why Kelly-Anne is so fascinated by these crimes, and she does some questionable things, yet we’re consistently intrigued and feel an empathy for her. How did you and Gariépy maintain that interest in her?
That’s a key question. The whole film either works or doesn’t based on that. In a lot of films, the audience identifies with the hero or the protagonist; in RED ROOMS, you don’t necessarily identify with Kelly-Anne, or maybe there’s a tiny percentage of people who do. So what can you have if you don’t identify with them? Well, at the very least you make them fascinating. One of the best antiheroes in recent memory is in THERE WILL BE BLOOD, for instance. You have this whole intro scene of him crawling out of a hole, and after that you’re like, “OK, I’ll follow this guy.” He’s just way too intense. As a filmmaker, as a storyteller, you have to make that happen, to make them extraordinarily interesting. But even more than that, Kelly-Anne had to be…not to reduce her to her physique, but she had to be visually fascinating, to have this magnetism where you can’t look away.
The red flags are there with her, but you’re not quite sure, and so you’re just intrigued. She’s an enigma, she’s a riddle, and you want to play with that Rubik’s Cube for a while. It takes a while until Kelly-Anne shows a bit more color and reveals her intentions, and that really happens in the second hour. Also, we didn’t want to have any backstory. I feel like cinema overindulges in backstory, and that in real life this is why we struggle to find the causes of evil. You know, I play violent video games, but I’m not a violent person. If you link problematic behavior to some kind of trauma, it just oversimplifies things. I don’t know why people do the things they do; we are the product of so many things that we consume every day.
So I wanted Kelly-Anne and her actions to exist in the present, and not to be defined by any label or backstory. Juliette’s approach to the role was to not judge her, and try to understand her own fantasies. It’s intense work that these actors do, stirring up things that are hidden within them, like, “I’m kind of similar to Kelly-Anne in a few ways,” and they cling to the things that make them closer to the role instead of farther apart. I also tried not to be judgmental of either Kelly-Anne or Clementine. Both of them find some sense of redemption at the end, even though it’s complicated.
When you were doing your research, did you come across anything that especially disturbed you?
Well, I stayed safe with the research. I tiptoed around the subject. Also, I had consultants, people in cybercrime who have seen so many gruesome things, and tech consultants in general, for the technology in the movie to be realistic. Obviously, in narrative film you bend the truth, you take a few shortcuts. Even down to the research I did with the lawyers, for example. In such a case in real life, the opening statements might be an hour long each, but that wouldn’t work for a film [laughs]. So obviously you bend the truth, but I wanted the film to work for people who are initiated in a few of these topics, either the courtroom stuff or the tech or the macabre stuff, and also for the people who aren’t. To try and bridge the gap between the geeks and the non-geeks, and make it understandable and intelligible for everyone.
The research I did involved a lot of YouTube, actually. There’s this whole subgenre there, the creepypastas, which are basically people telling scary stories that may or may not have actually happened. The good storytellers on YouTube actually affected me a lot. It goes back to the old tradition of campfire tales, and that inspired me way more than most contemporary horror films. When it came to what to show and not show, I felt it was more important to build up the tension in the details leading to something rather than the thing itself. That all came from listening to those creepypastas. They stimulate fewer senses, but your other senses go hyperactive, and that’s interesting to play with.
I did go back and watch a lot of thrillers. The inspiration for RED ROOMS is more European, or more ’90s, than very contemporary. People bring up, say, David Fincher, but I didn’t rewatch, say, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO. I’ve seen it, and it’s pretty well-digested at this point, but I rewatched movies like TESIS by Alejandro Amenábar, and a few Michael Haneke films, for sure. People who were doing kind of extreme films, but in a tasteful and suggestive manner. I didn’t rewatch HOSTEL, for instance; it just felt like that wasn’t the point.
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