By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Starring Juliette Gariépy, Laurie Babin and Elisabeth Locas
Written and directed by Pascal Plante
Utopia
If you see one scary movie with “room” in the title this weekend, be sure to seek out the limited release of RED ROOMS (LES CHAMBRES ROUGES), which is largely a dramatic thriller but ventures into seriously horrific areas of the psyche. The talk of last year’s Fantasia festival, where it landed several top awards, this Quebecois, French-language feature deserves the kudos in every way, and sits on the top rung of this year’s genre releases. (Kudos to distributor Utopia for bringing this one, as well as FEMME, the equally superior British film that also took big prizes at Fantasia ’23, to U.S. theaters.)
RED ROOMS is a deeply unsettling experience, a thoroughly engrossing character study and a meditation on the cult of serial-killer worship. The murderer in question is Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), who stands accused as the movie opens of killing three teenage girls in hideously grotesque ways, live-streaming the crimes in a “red room” on the dark web. (One has to wonder if his surname is an impish reference to Maurice Chevalier, who famously sang “Thank Heaven for Little Girls.”) Dubbed the “Demon of Rosemont,” he’s the object of a trial that has galvanized Montreal, and in particular fashion model Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy). In a lengthy opening sequence that immediately rivets your attention, writer/director Pascal Plante follows Kelly-Anne into the courtroom for the first day of Chevalier’s judgment, where the prosecution’s case against him and the defense’s statement are laid out in a long, unbroken take as cinematographer Vincent Biron’s slow-prowling camera seeks out the key figures. By the time it’s over, you’re as fascinated by the case as Kelly-Anne is.
You also quickly become fascinated by Kelly-Anne herself, for whom the trial is more than just an escape from her solitary lifestyle. She lives alone in an expensive-looking but sterile apartment high above the city, the wind moaning as if mourning outside, dominated by a double-monitor computer setup on which she plays the on-line poker that supplements her income. She also uses the Internet to feed her fixation on Chevalier, and, before long, to dig into details of one victim’s family. What is she up to? Plante doesn’t let us know for quite some time, effectively teasing us regarding her motives and endgame, and eschewing easy explanations for her obsession with Chevalier’s sick exploits. Gariépy superbly maintains a dispassionate exterior while hinting at darker impulses within, and she and Plante have created in Kelly-Anne a walking psychological puzzle you can’t take your eyes off of.
Kelly-Anne takes to sleeping on the sidewalk near the courthouse to assure herself a place in the gallery, which is how she meets Clementine (Laurie Babin), a teenager with an equally strong interest in Chevalier. As opposed to Kelly-Anne’s enigmatic attraction, Clementine is a full-fledged groupie who’s convinced of his innocence and takes any opportunity to declare it, including, in one memorable scene, calling in to a flashy TV talk show. Having traveled far from home, Clementine is invited by Kelly-Anne to stay at her place, and a friendship born of their shared passion begins to develop. While it’s easier to see where Clementine is coming from–a mix of wide-eyed idealism and youthful ignorance, perfectly conveyed by Babin while always holding our sympathy–it is again hard to predict where their relationship is headed, or how it will pay off, which adds an extra level of intrigue.
The one thing you can be sure of is that Plante will plumb ever-darker depths of human emotions and behavior, as Kelly-Anne in particular becomes consumed with the murders and the people involved. While there are moments of humor–Kelly-Anne has a Siri-like AI assistant that tells dad jokes, like Andy in ALIEN: ROMULUS–RED ROOMS is largely an exercise in gradually mounting dread. Plante derives this not from the gory details of what went on the red room, though he drops enough descriptive and aural hints to get us seriously disturbed. Rather, he taps into the widespread preoccupation with true crime, finding it to be almost as distressing as the crimes themselves. He and Biron have shot the movie in a 3:2 aspect ratio that visually traps the two leads in a confined space, much as Kelly-Anne becomes increasingly closed in, and shut off from the rest of her life, by her Chevalier fetish.
Once RED ROOMS gets into its home stretch, Kelly-Anne has begun taking seriously troubling actions indicating she has passed the point of no return. Yet through to the end, Plante surprises us with new shadings and revelations, while also keeping up the chill factor. In a cinematic landscape glutted with serial-killer flicks, he has found a fresh way to look at the subject, and to seriously creep us out.
