Red Rooms Review
French-language courtroom dramas have been ‘having a moment’ over the past couple of years. Alice Diop’s Saint Omer, the tale of a pregnant novelist who feels a worrying kinship with a woman on trial for killing her baby, won plaudits all over the world. And Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, about a woman who may or may not have killed her husband, won an Oscar.
They say that three makes a trend, and the film to do that is Red Rooms, by French-Canadian director Pascal Plante. Even darker than its predecessors, the movie tells the story of the trial of Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), accused of the brutal murders of three teenage girls, which he filmed and put on the dark web for people to pay to view. We follow an observer at this trial, Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), who becomes obsessed with the disturbing facts of the case.
Although the crime at the heart of Red Rooms is shocking, the film itself is not gratuitous or exploitative. We don’t see these awful videos; instead we watch the horror on the faces of the people watching them, or in one case, two medics entering the courtroom with a stretcher to help out a viewer who found the experience too much to take.
It’s fitting that we aren’t subjected to the videos, because the interest of Plante – who started thinking up the idea for the movie after watching too many true-crime documentaries during the pandemic – lies in the people who consume crimes as ‘entertainment’, more than in those most directly affected.
During the film, Kelly-Anne befriends Clementine (Laurie Babin), who is one of Ludovic’s groupies; she’s sure he couldn’t have done what he’s accused of because she can “see it in his eyes”. Obviously that’s nonsensical and indicative of a warped worldview, but all the same, there’s a genuine warmth that develops in her friendship with Kelly-Anne. Both women have been chronically lonely, yet after Kelly-Anne invites her new friend to stay, and they bond through squash games and messing about with an Alexa-like device, it seems like they could help each other.
Or – kill each other. Plante creates such an unsettling environment, centred on such awful crimes, and with a score that emphasises eerily loud silences, that we are never allowed to get a proper handle on these people. Whilst Clementine is actually, despite her morbid obsessions, often quite sweet, Kelly-Anne is an impenetrable cipher.
And Juliette Gariépy’s performance as her is a work of art. Somehow, she manages to exude a great depth of feeling without giving away what she’s feeling. To call her a blank would be inaccurate, as sometimes she’s almost feral with emotion (the most disturbing scene of the whole film stems from one of these occasions), and yet when you look into those dark eyes of hers, there’s absolutely nothing there. It’s an astonishing, unnerving turn.
As viewers, our need to empathise with Kelly-Anne and our inability to do so creates a deeply discomforting uncanny valley effect, which smartly compliments Red Rooms’ (and Nietzsche’s!) central question: can you look into the abyss without it looking back into you?
You won’t forget this movie, though you might want to….
★★★★★
