Morbidity is somehow a part of being human. Often the need to rationalize an interest in darker things, true crime for instance, tends to fall under the saying “the lady doth protest too much.” This is also why it is refreshing to note that Pascal Plante’s Quebecois techno-thriller “Red Rooms” offers no explanations or excuses for the serial killer fan woman. This woman attends the trial every single day, seemingly for fun. Her hidden motives are deeply unsettling and shrouded in mystery until the end of the film.
Plante’s unemotional tightens the screws as he leads up to perhaps the most jaw-dropping scene to grace the screen. In this scene, Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) shows up to the Montréal courthouse one fateful morning, dressed as a school girl. Incredibly, this school girl is one of the 13 victims of the accused Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos) and boy does she put on a show. This is not where the show ends, as she also throw Kelly-Anne right into the action and watches her get dragged out of the courtroom by his escort. On top of this, Kelly-Anne is the spitting image of the girl, truly sickening and as Ludovic waves, Kelly-Anne smiles right before the girl’s screams drown the song. In that single frame, the filmmaking volume turns operatic to further highlight the emotion.
In some ways, the supremely intelligent and disciplined Kelly-Anne does have similarities with Lisbeth Salander.
She’s the type of person who lives in a sterile high-rise apartment and earns a living off of high bet online poker games. Occasionally, she dabbles in modeling advertisements for a jewelry company, but that’s basically it when it comes to her social life. To add to her eccentric personality, she’s a hacker too. Some of the most fascinating moments in the film are when the audience gets a glimpse of how someone like Kelly-Anne could hack into systems or accounts that would allow an individual to, for instance, open the door to a dead girl’s home and take selfies in her bedroom. There is a difference between Kelly-Anne and Lisbeth however, and that is Lisbeth does not take the amoral extremes that very few characters in the film do.
Gariepy does not reveal much about the mental states of the characters, and this simulation is exactly what makes red rooms so interesting. Everyone, together with the audience, assumed Kelly-Anne is one of his groupies, to use the technical term, a Hybristophiliac. The nefarious side of his work is lightly touched by Plante through the character Clementine laurie babin who is a country girl with an deluded obsession to prove Ludovic’s innocence, and so becomes friends with Kelly-Anne.
A malleable thickheaded Clementine is exactly what we require to display to us how frozen Kelly-Anne is at her core, even if her story is, in fact, a drawn-out distraction from the main sickening narrative, we still need it.
“Red Rooms” is largely made up of Gariépy’s close up shots of him monotonously staring as she’s in the court and at home where Kelly-Anne is doing some so-called ‘research’ on Ludovics case through the dark web. Due to Gariépy’s performance being so restrained, it reveals far more than it conceals, lowering the importance of movement. The character’s emotions and intentions are clearer than ever before. Instead of judging, her gaze captures the audience and what’s more troubling is her icy inscrutability, devoid eyes and vacant expression makes her a captivating angle to the case, stunning in its perverse curiosity. So, Gariépy’s look turns painful to gaze at, That’s the beauty of it. The viewers are able to exaggerate their sentiments on human depravity and different quotes like snuff films and sadism onto Gariépy’s pale, lifeless face.
This is the part where the temperature begins to drop. The bleak gray palette with no emotion paired up with the slashing electric guitar on Dominique Plante’s score. The filming definitely does not help either.
During the courtroom sequences, the camera awkwardly pans around the area, unenthusiastically watching the audience listening to the riveting accounts of Ludovic’s red rooms, where torture and murder are simulated online. Instead of showing the videos, Mr. Plante chooses to elegantly blur into stills of a red-splattered setting along with some cringe-inducing sound effects. This ends up being more beneficial than if Red Rooms had taken a deep plunge into the violent graphic videos.
I can understand how Red Rooms decides to relent to the audiences’ comfort in the end. I do not, however, understand how mainstream audiences are expected to digest the film in its current state. But the problem is that those final ten minutes pales in comparison to the previous forty, during which Plante and Gariépy depict the most radical events, like Kelly-Anne’s painful unveiling. But one must also take their hat of and commend the filmmakers for boldness plucking up the courage to edge close to the deep and gaze into its depths.
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