Pascal Plante’s 'Red Rooms' Challenges Our Fascination with True Crime

Sep 2

If I didn’t know any better, I might think we were on the cusp of a resurgence of the legal thriller. Right on the heels of the fantastic awards season for last year’s Anatomy of a Fall, Pascal Plante brings his tense cyber/courtroom thriller to life in Red Rooms, which has already taken Fantasia Film Festival by storm, winning the Cheval Noir for best feature and best screenplay, as well winning best score. With a limited theatrical release slated for September 6, Red Rooms is poised to continue this momentum.

Starring Juliette Gariépy (who incidentally also won the Cheval Noir for outstanding performance) and Laurie Babin, Red Rooms details the highly publicized trial of Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), a Quebecois man accused of using the dark web to create and distribute snuff films showing the torture and murder of three teen girls. In addition to the press and families of the victims, the trial is attended by Kelly-Anne (Gariépy) and Clementine (Babin) each day—two self-described “groupies” of Chevalier’s, convinced of his innocence. But where Clementine is vocal about her convictions, taking any chance she can to insist to news media that all evidence against Chevalier is circumstantial and insufficient to convict, Kelly-Anne is much less revealing. Though she never says anything to dissuade Clementine, her apparent dispassion toward Chevalier leaves the audience to guess her motives.

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We quickly learn that much of Kelly-Anne’s time, when not following the trial or modeling at photo shoots, is spent at the computer in her sterile high-rise playing online poker. This back and forth—between the computer and the courtroom, an online world with seemingly no consequences, and the real world with very concrete ones—creates the bulk of the tension in the film. With each day in court, Kelly-Anne takes what she learns and chips away at the layers, not content with waiting for the lawyers to get to the heart of the matter, instead insisting that she find out the truth on her own.

And Kelly-Anne is very good at chipping away those layers. When Hollywood needs to depict hacking, with a few notable exceptions, it tends to succumb to the need to make it visually exciting and intense. Backed by pumping electronic soundtracks, Hollywood’s hackers furiously mash at their keyboards, lines of code streaming across their monitors or 3D renditions of physical “firewalls” breaking down, exploits appearing as visual objects dancing across the screen. Even those films that hackers, themselves, hold in high regard like WarGames (1983), Sneakers (1992), and Hackers (1995), which go the extra mile of getting much of the equipment and tactics real-life hackers use, fall victim to the studios’ addiction to action. Red Rooms, however, feels no such drive, painting a quieter, more calculated portrait of what it means to hack.

*Juliette Gariépy in* Red Rooms, image courtesy of Utopia Distribution.

In the courtroom, an expert witness describes for the jury “Tor,” an open-source, anonymous network tool used by hackers and dark web users to mask their online activity from prying eyes. At another point, when Kelly-Anne sits down at her computer, she is seen using DuckDuckGo, a Google-alternative search engine that promises similar anonymity and again, a popular tool for users concerned about data security. Already, this film sets itself apart as one that understands its characters more than most. As Kelly-Anne continues inching closer to the core of the case, she doesn’t rely on high-tech wizardry or flashy internet voodoo—she seeks out information, she learns what she can, not just about Chevalier, but about the victims and their families; in particular, the mother of one of the victims, Francine (Elisabeth Locas), who Kelly-Anne seems to focus on. Using nothing more than publicly available data and social engineering, Kelly-Anne swiftly gains access to Francine’s email and home networks—a reality that ought to be a wake-up call for the majority of us who take our security for granted.

Red Rooms pulls at the horror community’s fascination with extreme images. Whether it’s indie, lo-tech films like August Underground (2001) or Megan is Missing (2011); or part of the infamous New French Extremity movement like High Tension (2003) or Martyrs (2008); or even more mainstream titles like the Hostel and Saw franchises, horror fans can be gluttons for punishment when it comes to viewing simulated torture on the screen. And while critics are quick to voice fears of desensitization and mimicry, this fascination with the destruction of the human body doesn’t restrict itself to the hardest of hearts in horror fandom. Despite repeated warnings from both the judge and the prosecutor, no juror in Chevalier’s trial takes the invitation to excuse themselves due to the graphic nature of the evidence. When the courtroom gallery is cleared, Clementine expresses disappointment before desperately trying to glimpse the red room footage through the window. It’s the same macabre drive that compels ordinary people to crane their necks at a roadside accident and gather to watch crime scene investigations. Red Rooms is able to confront this drive, forcing us to question why we want to see, and it does so without ever giving in to those urges.

At the same time, it prods at the ongoing obsession with true crime. Both Kelly-Anne and Clementine’s existence stands in for the millions who regularly consume true crime shows, podcasts, films, books, etc., not to mention the groupies that have gathered around real-life serial killers for decades, including Jack the Ripper, Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, and Jeffrey Dahmer. Clementine’s zeal for preaching Chevalier’s innocence and Kelly-Anne’s determination to play detective—no matter the cost—speak to different sides of the same true crime coin. Too often, it seems, we find ourselves getting caught up in the mystery and the drama, choosing sides before a verdict has been reached, making it easy to forget that the crimes are real; the victims and their families are real. Unfortunately, it sometimes takes the families speaking out to remember that, as with the controversy surrounding the dramatization of Rita Isbell’s victim impact statement in Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (2022).

The way that Red Rooms thoughtfully tackles these darker sides of the internet (and entertainment) while managing to avoid perpetuating the very content it criticizes is extraordinary. Plante’s decision to keep Chevalier cordoned off from the rest of the courtroom, slumped and silent, de-romanticizes the killer without sacrificing his chilling stare. Meanwhile, Juliette Gariépy’s award-winning performance as Kelly-Anne, despite her reservedness, drives the story forward with dogged efficiency. This film’s methodic pace is bound to force it under the radar for many, but must not be missed. With limited theatrical engagements announced for September 6, with additional dates coming, Red Rooms should be at the top of your list.

Article Written by Ande Thomas

Ande loves the intersection of sci-fi and horror, where our understanding of the natural world clashes with our fear of the new and unknown. He is an independent member of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and a supporting member of the Horror Writers Association. He writes about monsters and foreign horror and can also be found over on Letterboxd.