‘Red Rooms’ Review: A True Crime Obsession Unravels (original) (raw)
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Critic’s Pick
A mysterious young woman becomes deeply invested in the trial of an accused serial killer in this courtroom thriller.
Laurie Babin as Clémentine, left, and Juliette Gariépy as Kelly-Anne in “Red Rooms.”Credit...Utopia
Sept. 5, 2024
Red Rooms
NYT Critic’s Pick
Directed by Pascal Plante
Crime, Horror, Mystery, Thriller
Not Rated
1h 58m
“Red Rooms,” a disturbing courtroom thriller from Quebec, explores the fascination with serial killers and true crime from an enticingly fresh perspective. Directed by Pascal Plante, it takes the genre’s ingredients — vulnerable girls, male sickos — and adjusts them to the loneliness of the internet age.
Kelly-Anne (a formidable Juliette Gariépy), a model, is deeply invested in the trial of Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos) — in part because she looks like the brunette version of one of his victims. Ludovic, a gaunt figure with sleepy eyes, has been accused of killing three teenage girls — not just killing, but torturing, disfiguring and dismembering them. These repugnant acts were captured on video, and anonymous users on the dark web paid extravagant sums to watch.
The first half of the film, composed of glacial pans and unsettlingly static images, builds up to the day of the trial when the full-length videos are presented to the jury. A conspiracy-peddler, Clémentine (Laurie Babin), believes Ludovic is innocent — she brings to mind a Manson groupie — but Kelly-Anne is something else, a kind of cyber-samurai who lives alone in a sterile high-rise and has a small fortune in bitcoin from playing online poker. The two women are always the first in line to secure a spot in the trial gallery and they bond, uneasily and with ambiguous motives, until the true nature of Kelly-Anne’s voyeurism pushes Clémentine away.
The film’s tension rides on the unknown, a paranoid vibe accented by Kelly-Anne’s shady online presence and Gariépy’s stark, sphinx-like performance. With a gaze that flings daggers, Gariépy’s an anchoring force that makes the more deranged second act feel credible. Most importantly, it’s her face — the way she looks at Ludovic in the courtroom or reacts to audio of screaming and chainsaw-whizzing — that works together with the film’s restraint to tug at our morbid curiosity.
In one scene, Kelly-Anne watches one of the videos and all we see is the menacing blood-red glow of the torture room illuminating her enraptured expression. What could be so awful? So hypnotizing? We’re dying to know.
Red Rooms
Not rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes.
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