Red Rooms review – a claus­tro­pho­bic tech-tinged nightmare

Red Rooms, for the unini­ti­at­ed, are the stuff of inter­net leg­end. Rumoured to exist on the ​‘dark web’ – only acces­si­ble through a spe­cial brows­er – these video por­tals con­nect pay­ing voyeurs with crim­i­nals who pro­vide videos, usu­al­ly live, of assault, tor­ture, or in extreme cas­es mur­der. While the exis­tence of these ​‘rooms’ is high­ly dis­put­ed, it’s no secret that the inter­net has long been a place for peo­ple to share the most depraved con­tent imag­in­able, whether it’s out in the open on social media, or via intri­cate pri­vate net­works that gov­ern­ment agen­cies spent years try­ing to crack. It’s easy to under­stand why the con­cept of pay-per-view tor­ture might cap­ture the imag­i­na­tion of film­mak­ers, but in Pas­cal Plante’s psy­cho­log­i­cal thriller, sen­sa­tion­al­ism thank­ful­ly takes a back seat.

As the tri­al begins for Ludovic Cheva­lier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), accused of kid­nap­ping, tor­tur­ing and mur­der­ing three teenage girls and broad­cast­ing his crimes to an online audi­ence, lawyers, police offi­cers and mem­bers of the press file into the Mon­tréal court­room. But some­one who is none of the above is there too: Kel­ly-Anne (Juli­ette Gar­iépy) is a civil­ian spec­ta­tor, who duti­ful­ly turns up to every day of the pro­ceed­ings. She sits in the back and lis­tens atten­tive­ly as the pros­e­cu­tion and defence deliv­er their cas­es. Every day she goes home to her apart­ment – a sleek glass box with a nifty tech set-up – where she plays online pok­er to sup­ple­ment her mod­el­ling income. The inter­net, it seems, is her pri­ma­ry hob­by, and she’s tak­en a spe­cial inter­est in Chevalier’s case, although her moti­va­tions for doing so are unclear.

While Kel­ly-Anne is hap­py to fly under the radar, this becomes dif­fi­cult when Clé­men­tine (Lau­rie Babin), a naïve mur­der groupie who swears Cheva­lier is inno­cent, takes a shine to her. Kelly-Anne’s feel­ings towards the accused are more dif­fi­cult to deci­pher – per­haps even to her­self. As the tri­al goes on, it begins to take a toll on her, even­tu­al­ly dis­rupt­ing her job and unnerv­ing her col­leagues. Per­haps her obses­sion is a form of self-sab­o­tage, or she relates more to Cheva­lier than she’s let­ting on. At any rate, we wit­ness Kel­ly-Anne utilise her tech-savvi­ness to unearth pri­vate details about the vic­tims’ fam­i­lies, and even to view the videos which depict the mur­ders. Through­out much of this, she appears glassy-eyed, and almost impassive.

Plante’s film avoids sen­sa­tion­al­ism for the most part by only show­ing the after­math of the mur­ders, along with a few har­row­ing snip­pets of audio – although it’s a film about a ser­i­al killer, Plante is much more inter­est­ed in how the con­sump­tion of true crime by spec­ta­tors might change their psy­che, and the ethics of becom­ing too involved in such cas­es. In one chill­ing scene, Kel­ly-Anne casu­al­ly hacks into the emails of one of the victim’s moth­ers, and then logs off to do a quick aer­o­bics ses­sion, total­ly unfazed by her own sociopathy.

Blend­ing court­room dra­ma and claus­tro­pho­bic tech-tinged night­mare, Red Rooms is a strik­ing and aus­tere exam­i­na­tion of the true-crime indus­tri­al com­plex that ben­e­fits from its for­mal­i­ty and dis­turbing­ly removed pro­tag­o­nist. Although in the end there’s a sense Kel­ly-Anne might have act­ed for the right rea­sons, one can’t help but won­der if she’s lost some of her human­i­ty along the way.