I watched the 2023 Canadian film RED ROOMS (Les chambres rouges) on Shudder, but come to think of it it’s not exactly a horror movie. It’s kind of more harsh than that. It’ an extremely unsettling character drama, maybe a thriller, about the trial of a man accused of horrific child murders live on webcam. We thankfully don’t have to see any of the violence, but the images created in our mind are worse, described with a true crime bluntness rather than genre flair. I would not say this is a fun movie.
It takes its sweet time rolling out what it will be about, or even what form it will take. One of the first scenes is a long unbroken shot of the judge’s introduction and the opening statements from both sides. It goes on long enough that I genuinely started to think the whole movie would be the trial – a new gimmicky format to put alongside mockumentary, found footage and screen time. A story told through testimony.
That’s not actually what it is, and even before it breaks we can see that the focus is on one of the court room observers, Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy, BOOST). The camera rotates around but keeps coming back to her reactions, and what she’s looking at in the room. Later we learn that she sleeps on the street every morning to get a good place in line, like it’s the first showing of THE PHANTOM MENACE, or a Taylor Swift concert. When reporters try to interview her leaving she shoos them away, though another observer, Clémentine (Laurie Babin, THE LITTLE GIRL WHO WAS TOO FOND OF MATCHES) is happy to tell them about all the conspiracies and injustices against poor Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos, LAND OF THE DEAD), who has kind eyes, she says. (To me he looks like a creep, but I only know him in the context of wearing an orange jumpsuit behind plexiglass examining his fingernails while people accuse him of atrocities.)
Kelly-Anne and Clementine later become friends in line, and even have lunch together. Though both know Ludovic’s birthday, they seem to be coming from different angles. When Clementine rants about “that bitch” the prosecutor (Natalie Tannous) and her lies, Kelly-Anne very calmly pokes holes in her hole-poking. Well, what about the bodies they found in his yard, etc. But otherwise she keeps her views and her motives for being here to herself.
One thing we know is that she’s an unusual person with unusual skills. She has a successful modeling career but seems to make most of her money from online poker – enough to live in one of those apartments that some of the cool movies favor (sleek and narrow with a huge window overlooking the city). She has her own home-brewed voice assistant named Guinevere that she tells Clementine about in more detail than any other subject we ever hear her talk about. Just as that initial court scene went on much longer than most movies would allow, we are privy to very long computing sessions where, for example, Kelly-Anne researches the mother of a victim (Elisabeth Locas), determines her address from the background behind her on a local news interview, looks at her house on Google Street View, figures out what type of smart home lock she uses, searches for her stolen passwords on hacker sites… jesus, lady, what are you up to? What are you getting us involved in?
These long, uninterrupted scenes turn us into curious voyeurs, much like the characters as they go down their morbid true crime rabbit holes. There’s alot of talk about graphic snuff videos, claims that they prove Ludovic’s guilt, apologies to the jurors for making them watch. Clementine desperately wants to see them, and the movie keeps teasing whether she will or not, which also begs the question of whether or not we’ll have to. Only later did it occur to me to wonder if writer/director Pascal Plante was pulling a Haneke, saying “You want to see it, don’t you, you sickos?” I don’t think he was, but just in case I want to tell him – fuck no! I was so relieved not to see it.
There are some real interesting, sometimes queasy uncertainties here. We spend enough time with these women to sympathize with them as human beings and hope the best of them, but that might be a mistake on our part. I like the contrast between the two fangirls, the way my thoughts shifted on which one is closer to reasonable, and how much of a moral compass either of them might have. Kelly-Anne is also just fascinating to watch because she’s such a hyper-competent weirdo. There’s a very tense scene where she’s going back and forth between bidding in a tense underground auction and playing a high stakes poker game to win the Bitcoin she needs to pay. She’s like The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo except even messier.
Before I go I’d like to mention that the score by Plante’s brother Dominique (also a songwriter for pop singer Ariane Roy) is very good, especially the opening theme.
If you can stomach the subject matter, RED ROOMS is a really good one – original, confident, puzzling in a good way, haunting in a bad way. It’ll creep you the fuck out, though. Don’t underestimate the Canadians.
January 21st, 2025 at 8:01 am
Watched this the other day and it left me puzzled. There were set ups for lots of interesting twists but the movie took none of them and played it pretty straight forward (not sure if that’s a spoiler? Apologies if so). Rather than thinking the character had lots of complicated motivations at the end, it felt to me like they weren’t sure how to end the movie?
Also, the majority of “Anatomy of a Fall” is told through testimony. I think that framing device would have worked better for this movie.