‘Red Rooms’: Karlovy Vary Review

Dir/scr: Pascal Plante. Canada. 2023. 118mins

It’s the first day of the trial of Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), a man accused of three horrific murders -  crimes all the more appalling for being live-streamed for a paying audience in a dark web ’red room’. Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) has slept on the street overnight to make sure that she gets a seat in the public gallery of the Superior Court of Quebec; over the weeks that follow, her obsessive fascination with the case draws her to ever darker places. With his second feature, Quebecois director Pascal Plante taps into society’s unhealthy preoccupation with evil, taking it to chilling extremes with the character of Kelly-Anne. This cool-headed, clear-eyed and unsensational approach only serves to heighten the film’s sickening tension. It’s an uncomfortable watch, but a extremely effective one.

An uncomfortable watch, but an extremely effective one

Red Rooms is a marked tonal shift from Plante’s equally impressive debut feature, Nadia, Butterfly (2020) which followed an Olympic swimmer negotiating the end of her competitive sports career.  A tantalising combination of courtroom drama and unnerving psychological horror should be of interest to distributors looking for smart and sophisticated genre-adjacent material; ESC Distribution have already taken rights for France, Belgium and Switzerland. It’s certainly one of the more effective films to tackle the malign mythology of the red room, its chilly composure a stark contrast to the lurid pulp of the recent similarly-themed Netflix title, Luther: The Fallen Sun.

By focusing not so much on the crimes themselves, but on the kind of person – the murder groupie – who gravitates towards the killer, the film explores an intriguing angle. It does not, however, present a glib justification for what drives this striking, self-sufficient young woman  to the court, day after day (Kelly-Anne makes a lucrative career as a model and an online poker player). She’s an enigma. She’s likely a sociopath. Alone, but not seemingly lonely, she is an accomplished hacker who is more at ease with virtual encounters than real ones. Glassily impassive for much of the film, she begins to crack only when she senses that her control of the world around her is starting to slip.

Plante floods Kelly-Anne’s scenes with blue – the subdued, soft blue of the dawn light on the street where she sleeps, the irradiating blue glow of the computer screens that filter most of her interactions with the outside world. When, at the very end of the picture, she is drenched in vivid red instead, it’s a jolt. It feels as though something has shifted and a line has been crossed, both by the film and the character.

It is an unsettling place to spend time, shadowing someone who is being voluntarily sucked into a vortex of unimaginable horrors. Which is why the introduction of a second character almost comes as a relief. Clementine (Laurie Babin) is a gauche young woman who believes that Ludovic Chevalier has been framed for the crime, on the evidence of his sad, soulful eyes. With her self-effacing tendencies and her naivety, Clementine is initially an irksome presence for Kelly-Anne. But a cautious alliance – it’s not warm enough to be called a friendship – develops between them. But the bond, such that it is, is severed when Clementine realises just how far down the rabbit hole Kelly-Anne has already travelled.

For her part, Kelly-Anne discovers that there are places from which, once you visit, it’s very hard to come back.