‘Red Rooms’ Review: Pascal Plante’s Latest Tackles the Shadiest Corners of the Dark Web

Courtesy of Utopia

Since the "golden age" of serial killers during the last thirty years of the twentieth century, a perplexing intrigue has formed around many of the most notorious figures who defined the era. After their convictions, infamous personalities like Ted Bundy and Charles Manson notably garnered huge followings around the world, mainly from beguiled female fans, who were able to piece together media coverage and public conspiracy to construct deeply subjective relationships with these immoral criminals. Now concretized through the term hybristophilia, also known as "Bonnie and Clyde Syndrome," this fixation continues to manifest in contemporary times, specifically through the reinvigorated fascination with true crime that pop culture has adopted in recent years via the endless streaming series and podcasts that bring horrendous violent crimes back into our everyday conscience. With his latest film, Red Rooms, French-Canadian filmmaker Pascal Plante takes a hard look at the phenomenon of hybristophilia through a thoroughly modern and deliberate perspective, assembling a serial killer film that sharply circumvents all expectations.

Red Rooms takes place in Montreal, where Ludovic Chevalier, the "Demon of Rosemont," is on trial for the brutal torture and murder of three teenage schoolgirls, which he live-streamed on a dark web pay-per-view "red room" for wealthy customers. Present every day of Chevalier's trial is Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), an intensely enigmatic model/professional poker player/computer aficionado whose committed stake in the case is challenging to understand. As the trial unfolds, Kelly-Anne forms an improbable connection with one of Chevalier's devotees, who has also become obsessed with the situation, the goofy but endearing Clémentine (Laurie Babin). While the court officials scramble to find where Chevalier's missing red room video is located and solid proof that he is, in fact, the killer, Kelly-Anne and Clémentine delve deeper into his heinous acts and the frenzy surrounding the high-profile case, becoming splintered by their shared mania in ways both seen and unseen.

Courtesy of Utopia

As soon as Red Rooms enters the courtroom for the first time in the movie's earliest moments, Plante's instincts detour from what audiences have learned to predict from the serial killer genre. The camera slowly, gracefully flows around the sterile room, concentrating on the judge, jury, prosecutors, and then finally, the killer himself: Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe Lokos). However, in a radical break from the expected, the gaze shifts to Kelly-Anne, gradually zooming in and finally resting its priority. This transparent decision from the start lays out Plante's unique approach, one much more captivated by the forces that create such mythic intrigue around criminals rather than the perpetrators themselves. Chevalier's alleged crimes hold the focus of Red Rooms and its characters, but he is never humanized or sought to be understood by Plante's script; instead, he is entirely confined to the glass defendant's cage as the movie oscillates from the courtroom to Kelly-Anne's life outside of it.

Staying distanced from its antagonist, Red Rooms is much more interested in understanding its two central female characters: Kelly-Anne and Clémentine. Although they share a common fascination with Chevalier's case, the film's narrative portrays them in totally distinctive manners, pointing to the social and financial forces that distinguish the women within the worlds they inhabit. Kelly-Anne lives in an ultra-modern high-rise apartment decked with state-of-the-art technology, although sparsely furnished to mirror her isolated life. She balances her modeling career with a lucrative side hustle playing online poker, carefully planning every moment of her calendar with unnatural precision. As her near opposite, Clémentine is a bit of a drifter, who scraped together enough money to hitchhike from the hinterlands of Quebec into Montreal to attend the trial. When Kelly-Anne unexpectedly invites Clémentine to stay with her, their contrasting situations could not be more noticeable: Kelly-Anne is fluent in English while Clémentine struggles. Clémentine's lack of direction in life affords her a free-spiritedness that Kelly-Anne's privilege does not afford her. Through the disparate perspectives of these two women, Red Rooms can intelligently dissect the forces and motivations that play into their increasing obsession with Chevalier's case. 

The movie's depiction of technology and its expanding interconnectivity with everyday life conveys Plante's future-projecting trepidations. As technology becomes more accessible globally, our dependency upon it has evolved into an unmistakable concern, often sequestering individuals from the reality of their physical community and the sustenance it can provide under the right circumstances. This idea is portrayed in Red Rooms via Kelly-Anne's lonesome life, where she may maintain conventional monetary success but lacks any emotional support. Red Rooms builds elements of its horrors into the nonspace of the dark web. In this exclusive, immaterial world, criminal activity can go unchecked and unseen by those who do not understand how it works, posing an existential panic specific to modernity. Throughout the film, Plante's vision criticizes the contemporary media machine and its relentless regurgitation of sensationalized headlines and its reliance on graphic imagery and tragedy to sell its message to the public. The ravenous public fixation with Chevalier's case in the film embodies this morbid fascination, capturing the extremities of public opinion in a world where individuals often escape their real troubles to become the ultimate jurors over media spectacles.

Beyond the shape-shifting narrative and engaging characters in Red Rooms, the dynamic craft contributes to the film's overall unsettling and grim impressions. The endlessly grey skies and cruel winds that whip through Montreal as the city transitions into the winter months reflect and enforce the movie's unsettling subject matter. Cinematographer Vincent Biron adopts a cold, controlled visual language that slowly evolves into a frantic phantasmagoria of color and unease as the film's characters fall into chaos as the movie moves forward. The director's brother, Dominique Plante, worked as Red Room's composer, assembling a sparsely used but eerie orchestral score that underscores the movie's most rousing moments.

Through Red Rooms, Plante presents a cutting but resonant fresh take on the serial killer film. By bypassing the genre's expectations, the movie explores the public's complicated connection to the violent crimes that inspire them. Without ever wilting, Red Rooms confronts the gruesome violence of its perpetrators and the influences it has on those affected by it, both consciously and unconsciously. Intellectually challenging and wholly unpredictable, Red Rooms is a must-see of 2024 for any die-hard fans of horror.

4/5

‘Red Rooms’ first premiered in 2023, appearing at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival and the Fantasia Film Festival. Utopia will handle the theatrical distribution of 'Red Rooms' in the United States, which begins Friday, September 6. Click here for more information about ‘Red Rooms.’