Red Rooms review - the darkest of webs

A woman sits at her computer. She copy-pastes an address into a search engine. She goes to street view. She zooms in. Click. Opens a new tab. Click. Searches a name. There are no lines of green code on a black screen or indecipherable programmes that we associate with sketchy online activity. Instead the woman is doing the kind of amateur sleuthing that anybody with a computer and internet connection can do. 

Red Rooms' portrayal of an aspect of everyday life that too often feels stilted on the big screen is one of the many things this Quebecois thriller gets right. It explores how the internet fuels morbid curiosity and the disturbing way it collapses the public and private and does so in a sharp and stylish way. Written and directed by Pascal Plante, the film all the makings of a cult hit, sweeping genre festivals like Fantasia International Film Festival and sparking fervent debates online long before its official US and UK release last weekend. 

During the first 20 minutes, you might expect this to be another sleek French-language courtroom drama like Alice Diop’s Saint Omer or Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or-winning Anatomy of a Fall from last year. As the camera slowly pans around the cold, modern-looking courtroom, we hear the prosecutor and the defence give their opening remarks. We learn that the man on trial, Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos, pictured below) is charged with a heinous crime: kidnapping, murdering, and dismembering three young girls and live-streaming it on the Dark Web in so-called Red Rooms, long-thought to be an internet myth. 

But we are not here for the trial, we are here for Kelly-Anne who is seated in the public gallery. Kelly-Anne (in an excellent performance by Juliette Gariépy) lives alone in a small, expensive flat where she sits glued to her dual-screen computer monitors. There she researches the Chevalier case, plays online poker, sends emails through her voice-controlled operating system and works out to Youtube videos. She is also a fashion model and spends her working days draped in designer clothing. 

As the trial goes on she slowly befriends another public gallery regular, the loud-mouthed Clémentine, played with verve by Laurie Babin. She is a proud conspiracy theorist who believes Chevalier to be innocent and has no qualms telling anyone who will listen.

In a fantastically strange montage sequence, the kind associated with cheesy rom-coms, this unlikely pair eat lunch together, talk late into the night, and sit side-by-side in court, all the while witnessing the horrific evidence presented to them. Red Rooms is filled with this type of pitch-black humour that wriggles its way under your skin.

Despite the sensational subject matter, Red Rooms favours atmosphere and tension over dramatic plot-twists. And like Kelly-Anne playing poker, the film plays its cards close to its chest. Even as her murky reasons for being at the trial begin to surface, we still can’t quite place her. 

Red Rooms is perhaps both a study of hybristophilia (the phenomenon of being attracted to criminals), an indictment of true-crime as entertainment, and an unflattering look at the societal id that is the internet. With Red Rooms, Plante has surely distinguished himself as one of the most exciting new voices in cinema. 

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