2025 Top Ten List #9 Red Rooms (Les Chambres Rouges)

 

Writer/director Pascal Plante

RED ROOMS (Les Chambres Rouges)                     A-                                                     Canada  (118 mi)  2023  d: Pascal Plante

An unsettling psychological cyber-thriller with horror elements, a character study, and a scintillating courtroom drama that exposes the public’s morbid curiosity with serial killers. This is the kind of film that grabs you by the throat and won’t let go, keeping you intrigued from start to finish, as the filmmaker does an excellent job sustaining the suspense, feeling a connection to those paranoid conspiracy thrillers from the 70’s, like Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974), Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (1975), and Sydney Pollack’s THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR (1975), all of which feature dynamic lead performances.  This film is no different, with the camera holding tight to the face of Juliette Gariépy as Kelly-Anne, who provides a positively riveting performance, rarely uttering a word, keeping her thoughts close to herself, where you continually wonder what her interest is in this high-profile courtroom case of accused 40-year old murderer Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), who is suspected of having kidnapped, tortured, sexually abused, murdered, and dismembering three teenage girls aged between thirteen and sixteen.  Making matters worse, he live-streamed the murders in a so-called Red Room, or torture chamber, over the Dark web to anonymous viewers who were willing to pay large sums of cryptocurrency for the gruesome experience, exposing a dehumanizing capitalist system that exploits extreme brutalization for profit, opening up our eyes to the impunity of cybercriminals.  Tapes exist for two of the murders, but not the youngest, with forensic experts able to determine the identity of the murderer from behind his covered mask.  Nicknamed the Demon of Rosemont by the media, after the borough of Montreal where the crimes occurred, the trial receives widespread television coverage, where the opening courtroom scene is beautifully shot in one long take by Vincent Biron, whose exquisite, formally sophisticated work creates a sensual elegance to what we’re witnessing.  Despite the horrific nature of the crime, that becomes purely secondary, as our real interest lies in the reactions of others, specifically Kelly-Anne, a deeply ambiguous and opaque figure whose total absence of emotion is startling, living in sterile yet spotless opulence in an upscale high-rise apartment with no furniture and floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the city, where she is seen attending the trial each day, yet the real beauty of the film is that her interest in the case remains a mystery.  At first we think she may be a reporter, but then we see her do some chic modeling for a fashion shoot, which is like a burst of combustible energy that comes out of nowhere, with quick cuts accompanied by furiously explosive music, where the heavily atmospheric musical score is composed by the director’s brother, Dominique Plante.  Kelly-Anne’s complete isolation is striking, exhibiting ghost-like qualities, where her spectral presence feels haunting, as she’s very used to being in control and only interacts with the world by proxy, remaining highly introverted and keeps to herself, where among her idiosyncrasies, she drinks protein smoothies, works out to Chloe Ting videos, plays squash by herself, loving the feel of smashing the ball to relieve tension, while the only light in her apartment comes from the dual computer screens, as she never turns on the lights.  Something of a computer wizard, she’s modeled somewhat from the fictional character of Lisbeth Salander from Stieg Larsson’s immensely popular Millennium series, an anti-social computer hacker with a photographic memory, where the first part of the series was directed by Swedish director Niels Arden Oplev in THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (2009), later remade in the U.S. by David Fincher, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011).  The similarities between the characters are striking.   

Joining fellow Québecois filmmakers Denys Arcand, Denis Villeneuve, and Xavier Dolan, Plante is a Canadian filmmaker from Québec City, not well known even in Canada, who was also a national-level competitive swimmer as a teenager, unsuccessfully trying out for Canada’s swimming team for the 2008 Summer Olympics held in Beijing, now working primarily out of Montreal, which was the setting a decade ago of the highly publicized trial of one of Canada’s most notorious killers, Luka Magnotta (the Magnotta video), who was accused in the particularly gruesome Murder of Jun Lin.  Some of the details of that incident inform this film, as the accused posted a sadistically graphic video online, while he also similarly sat in the courtroom behind a glass enclosure, never uttering a single word.  Cameras were not allowed inside the courtroom then, so hand-drawings were all the public had to go on during the trial coverage, leaving a lot to the imagination.  That may have actually spawned the idea for this film, as well as movies like Michael Haneke’s measured and precise depictions of violence in Benny's Video (1992), Funny Games (1997), and Caché (Hidden) (2005), and also Olivier Assayas’ Demonlover (2002), filmmakers who are extremely conscious about the psychological impact of the violence they depict.  This ambitiously complex film has a similar psychological mindset, drawing us into this disturbing and unsettling drama, yet leaving most to the imagination, as the worst remains offscreen, yet what we’re left with is the enigma and personal obsession of Kelly-Anne, who is meticulous to a fault, one of the most mysteriously intriguing characters seen in years, onscreen nearly the entire time, though we know so little about her.  While Kelly-Anne is aloof and quiet, she meets another friend in court, Clémentine (Laurie Babin), who is nervously chatty, just a bundle of nerves, an overly naïve and mentally unstable Ludovic Chevalier groupie, much like Charles Manson’s groupies, who swears he is innocent, claiming most of the technological evidence used against him could have been hacked, believing he is being framed.  She even goes on camera for the TV news reporters and passionately defends him, claiming the arrest and trial are the real atrocity.  Kelly-Anne befriends her, but they are polar opposites, as the penniless Clémentine hitchhiked into the city and has been sleeping in bus stations, with no visible means of support, while Kelly-Anne’s apartment is immaculate, filled with state of the art technology, including her own custom-programmed, hacker impenetrable AI voice assistant named Guinivère, basically her eyes and ears that responds to voice commands, and even tells jokes, when asked, arguably her best friend in the world.  Her computer hacking skills are on government intelligence level, as she’s easily able to navigate spaces most of us never even knew existed, and do it in a state of utter calm, like a Zen state, while unlike most every other movie, the expressionistic filming of the computer browsing adds complex levels to the intrigue, literally drawing our attention to the intensity of the experience, where the human interaction with the computer screens feels real.  It turns out she’s also a professional online poker player, using all the mathematical algorithms to ensure the greatest opportunity of success, wasting little time on low percentage hands, where she’s able to focus her attention with an uncanny ability of recall, as nothing slips by her.  For this reason, her relationship with the downtrodden, anxiety-ridden Clémentine is puzzling, as they have nothing in common except the trial, yet the pair have been accused of being groupies by the mother of a victim, “You’re spitting on our daughter’s grave,” finding their presence in the courtroom revolting, like a weird cult worshipping at the feet of the killer.  

Listed as the #1 film of the year by The Ringer: Adam Nayman: The Best Movies of 2024, Plante seems to be fascinated with the idea of a female version of Travis Bickle from Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), an obsessively dark loner whose motivations remain unclear, suggesting cinema is filled with male characters like that, while ignoring the same qualities in women.  Perhaps a female version of the Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) character in Mary Harron’s American Psycho (2000), or a strange descendent from David Cronenberg’s eerie cult horror classic VIDEODROME (1983), what distinguishes this film is what happens when reality blurs with Kelly-Anne’s own morbid fantasies, growing increasingly bizarre as she enters morally dubious territory, where she goes down a dark path to seek the final piece of the puzzle.  A cryptic horror study of both a serial killer and a pathological protagonist with a fanatical fascination with the murderer, she’s like an adrenaline junkie who gets off on venturing into taboo territory, paying extraordinary attention to detail, the film intellectually examines the border between delusion, reality, and wish fulfillment.  When the courtroom is cleared to show the tortuous videos exclusively to the jury, Clémentine, in particular, is upset, believing they might show evidence which could exonerate Ludovic.  She’s positively dumbfounded to hear that Kelly-Anne already has seen them multiple times and has access to the videos, contending they only confirm his guilt, as they contain the exact same physical attributes and mannerisms that are unique to him, so she not only believes he committed the crimes, but may also admire him for the savvy way it was carried out.  Kelly-Anne invites Clémentine into her home to watch them together, bathed in red light, shocked and wretchedly repulsed by the brutality of what she sees and the agonizing screams she hears, bewildered at how utterly horrifying it is, reducing her to tears, deciding then and there to buy a bus ticket and return back home, losing all interest in the case.  Her disappearance, however, triggers something in Kelly-Anne, leaving more expansive room for her to literally dominate the screen with devastating results, becoming intimately familiar with the Tor browser in her pursuit of that final video of the third girl.  It’s remarkably astute filmmaking, as it takes us on a mesmerizing journey, so sterile and sleek, moving with a glacial coldness, matching her cold and pragmatic attitude, so completely anonymous as she literally cyber-stalks and infiltrates the secret lives of unsuspecting others, becoming an unhealthy and perhaps uncontrollable psychotic fixation, hacking into their most private and seemingly protected personalized spaces, including their homes, where the relative ease of access for her is alarming, opening our eyes to suspicious behavior rarely seen in movies, yet expressed so quietly and poetically.  This film doesn’t have the critical acclaim and festival circuit notoriety of Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall (Anatomie d'une chute) (2023), but it’s far more successful in lingering in the viewer’s imagination afterwards, embedded somewhere in the deep recesses of the brain.     

With vague, mythological The Lady of Shalott Arthurian references, which is Kelly-Anne’s online username and computer screensaver image, some of this resembles the murky world of dreams, veering completely out of the ordinary, changing the entire trajectory of the film, bearing something in common with Olivier Assayas’ Demonlover (2002), which at the time of its release was remarkably insightful about disturbing uses of modern technology, and now twenty years later, as technology has only become more advanced, our voyeuristic addiction to social media has grown in equal proportions, where people are more plugged-in than ever before, where the isolation of the Covid pandemic may have inadvertently contributed to this phenomenon.  In this day and age we are becoming increasingly desensitized to online violence, where it is not uncommon to witness smartphone videos of mass shootings, mutilated and dismembered victims of genocide in the Congo (funded by the sale of cellphones, Opinion | Death by Gadget in Congo), ISIS beheadings, unending bombings and perpetual starvation in Gaza, or shooting fatalities at the hands of the police, as these images are literally everywhere.  It’s disgusting that the horrifying methods of torture and murder live-streamed over the Internet reveal there are people who are crazy and wealthy enough to watch snuff films as they happen, suggesting there is not only a morbid fascination but a market price for this kind of heinous crime, raising questions about what that means in our technologically obsessed society.  As revolting as that may be, it’s a much smaller scale than the massive horrors inflicted by technology and the unethical billionaires who run questionable web platforms, routinely spewing unchecked lies and misinformation on a massive scale, including Nazi propaganda, while white supremacist ideology has not only re-infected our national discourse but it’s become our official national policy, where our narcissistic obsession with social media got a racist moron elected President of the United States, literally whitewashing and rewriting the past as if he wants to make the Confederacy great again, and the dangers he is inflicting on the world are just getting started, where some of his pardons have already cheapened the rule of law.  It’s a disturbing trend that has a major impact in our lives, delving deeper into a spiritual and social abyss that we may never come out of, affecting so many innocent and unsuspecting people, yet few films are daring enough to show us the hellish side of the Internet, where the harmful effects of technology have rarely been more scrutinized.  Never spelling anything out, allowing each viewer to make up their own minds about the shadowy implications, it’s a staggering piece of filmmaking, hugely provocative, disturbing and intoxicating at the same time, elegant in its austere detachment, taking us into the darkest corners of the human soul, where no one who sees it will be left unaffected.   

Anatomy of a Fall (Anatomie d'une chute)

 

Director Justine Triet

Triet accepting the Palme d'Or at Cannes

Triet with her cast at Cannes

Triet with actress Sandra Hüller

ANATOMY OF A FALL (Anatomie d'une chute)               B+                                                       France  (152 mi)  2023  d: Justine Triet

Sometimes a couple is kind of a chaos.           —Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller)

Courtroom dramas are their own entity, where it’s hard to sustain the tension throughout, though several films that come to mind are Carl Theodor Dreyer’s THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (1928), Sidney Lumet’s 12 ANGRY MEN (1957), Billy Wilder’s WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION (1957), Otto Preminger’s ANATOMY OF A MURDER (1959), which this title references, Robert Bresson’s The Trial of Joan of Arc (Procès de Jeanne d'Arc) (1961), Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), and more recently Alice Diop’s Saint Omer (2022).  When a husband is found dead after a fall from a third story window, the French court charges the wife with murder, though the crime of passion is purely based on speculation, having no evidence actually tying her into a crime.  What’s perhaps most surprising about this film is it never answers the central question, where the entire film is something of a distracting Hitchcock MacGuffin, offering extraneous theories and clues that are besides the point, but there is a website set up at didshedoit.com (ANATOMY OF A FALL), which is uniquely shown onscreen before the story even begins asking viewers to vote on that very question.  Clearly no definitive answer is ever given.  Apparently actress Sandra Hüller, playing the wife, was unsure as well during the filming, according to a Q&A during the New York Film Festival, repeatedly asking the director if she was guilty, but no answer was forthcoming.  So instead of innocence or guilt, what dominates the film is the intelligence of the storytelling, subtly weaving together various strands of possibilities, becoming more of a character study revealing underlying motives, moving back in time for one powerful flashback sequence, with the camera strategically zooming in during key revelations, where the courtroom dissection of a marriage becomes a commentary on how news is disseminated through social media outlets, routinely delving into private lives, where lies become facts after repeated airings, with viewers unable to distinguish between the haze of prejudice and emotions that intentionally cloud our judgment, ultimately becoming an exposé on the fallibility of perception, where who and what’s to be believed remains an open question, even in a courtroom.  The French courtroom is nothing like what we see in America, where lawyers run the show with legal objections, as it’s more conversational, where the accused is allowed to speak directly to the judge, prosecutor, and stream of witnesses, feeling more like a democratic process.  The film won the coveted Palme d’Or 1st Place prize at the Cannes Film Festival, where Justine Triet is the third female director to win the prize, though to be honest, the festival has had more than a decade of controversial choices, many of which are highly questionable, in particular the last two years, where the distinction of such a prestigious award doesn’t often translate to box office success, as the theater was nearly empty when recently seen, yet in France it had the best opening of any Palme d’Or film since Laurent Cantet’s The Class (Entre Les Murs) (2008).  This is the kind of film where you may wonder what all the fuss is about, but the set-up is unusual, to say the least, as it’s a French court with a German suspect who speaks English, where it meanders for an inordinately long time in ludicrous speculation, as the police investigation offers no clear picture, so the courtroom drama is a whirlwind of theatrical suppositions, all intended to sway public opinion, yet what it actually reveals is how difficult it is to get at the philosophical question of what is truth.  For instance, the prosecution spends plenty of time on an argument the married couple had the day prior to the death, which gets into heated emotions, none of which shed any light on any potential murder, but does get inside the head of the characters, where it must be said that far less than 1% of these kinds of escalated marital tensions actually lead to murder, so how much weight can anyone give to such an operatic theory, yet it becomes a central thread of a courtroom drama that delves into excruciatingly uncomfortable personal moments that could just as easily have been called Anatomy of a Marriage.  It’s unlikely anyone will be swayed by these courtroom arguments, which may actually be the point, becoming a metaphor for all the biased rhetoric that fills the airwaves, mirroring the media frenzy that surrounds the case, where at some point you just want to shut it off, as it can get pretty disgusting, creating visceral anger when even the most reputable news outlets resort to this kind of subterfuge.   

The setting is an isolated mountain chalet in the Grenoble region of the French Alps heavily submerged in snow, as we see successful German author Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller) being interviewed at home by graduate student Zoé (Camille Rutherford), yet despite the relaxed conversation, it is disrupted and eventually stopped by the unusually loud music coming from the upstairs loft where the unseen husband Samuel is busily working on repairs, yet this wildly exotic Caribbean steel drum music playing on a loop cranked up to high volume becomes a dominant theme of the film, a 2008 remix, which is an instrumental cover of rapper 50 Cent’s 2003 hit Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band - PIMP - YouTube (3:14), which couldn’t be more out of place in the snow covered Alpine region, yet literally swirls around in your head for days afterwards.  While it’s not immediately evident, Sandra has a blind son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), who goes out on a sunny mountain walk with his guide dog Snoop (who figures prominently in this movie), yet when they return they discover the dead body lying in the snow, which sets the story in motion.  An autopsy reveals his head wound was inflicted before his body hit the ground, putting Sandra under suspicion, as we see her conferring with her attorney Vincent Renzi (Swann Arlaud) before any charges are filed, with thoughts of arguing it was a self-inflicted suicide, as that is their best courtroom defense.  Because her son is blind, there’s not really a witness that can shed light on what led up to this event, other than what he heard, so police call in experts to summarize their best case scenarios.  This is a film that the less you know ahead of time works to its advantage, as the film is chalk full of revelations that are completely surprising and in some cases utterly transfixing, becoming more of a puzzle piece, with a lot of missing pieces.  To start with, let’s mention the way the director utilizes the camera, shot mostly in a cinéma vérité aesthetic by Simon Beaufils, especially in the beginning when they’re investigating the crime scene, as the characters seem intrinsically linked together by the framing and staging, offering little hints and clues that leave viewers questioning the findings.  Yet most importantly, this is a disturbing yet compelling study that values character over plot, where it’s that personalized viewpoint that makes this film so resonant, with powerful performances that are off the charts.  We’ve seen Sandra Hüller before in Thomas Stuber’s German film In the Aisles (In den Gängen) (2018), but most especially in Marin Ade’s hilariously unorthodox and thoroughly confounding 2017 Top Ten List #2 Toni Erdmann (2016), also appearing in Triet’s earlier film Sibyl (2019) and Jonathan Glazer’s THE ZONE OF INTEREST (2023), where she exudes strength and vulnerability, yet it’s her intelligence and literary sense of self-awareness that elevates this into something more than it appears, yet there’s also an inescapable feeling that we can never fully trust her.  By allowing us to get a glimpse of her history, we realize just how complex a person she is, and that aspect alone really makes this film shine.  It’s a captivating mystery where you never really know what’s going to happen next, as a lengthy introductory sequence familiarizes us with the situation, and it comes as no surprise that she’s charged with a murder, but it’s the courtroom scenes that lure viewers into the heart of the matter.  While there’s legal banter that goes back and forth, as each side attempts to undercut the other side’s credibility, it gets decidedly different when the flamboyant prosecution resorts to a personalized smear campaign targeting the accused, which seems morally unethical, particularly when there is no criminal evidence associated with this line of attack, so this character assassination takes us into unprecedented territory for courtroom dramas.  Triet introduces a role reversal, as women have always been at home, while men have been free to explore the world through their careers and share ideas with others.  Women simply didn’t have that time, as they were too busy taking care of domestic tasks.  To find a female character who writes books, who is in the position to take the time to write, means that it’s the man who sacrifices in order to meet her needs, and he’s none too happy about it.  The prosecutor drives this point home, becoming a focal point of male resentment, which leads him into outlandish accusations suggesting it’s all her fault, contending she drove him to his death, but Sandra is having none of it.  Ironically, in death, Samuel finally gets the attention he never received during his lifetime.  

While some believe there are pacing issues, that the film drags in places due to its length, yet what happens in that courtroom is riveting, where the intensity level leaves no avenue of escape, as you’re stuck there, literally at the mercy of the filmmaker, where a relentless assault takes place before our eyes, which is not just distasteful, especially when the sexist prosecutor, Antoine Reinartz from Robin Campillo’s 2017 Top Ten List #8 BPM (Beats Per Minute (120 battements par minute), mocks the accused for suggesting any scenario other than his own, which, of course, is pure conjecture, so there’s this morally superior, omniscient voice of God offering judgement and condemnation, joined by well-rehearsed witness testimony to support his contention, with the accused a bit beffudled by it all, as it makes little sense to her, Anatomy Of A Fall - Justine TRIET Clip [Cannes] YouTube (57 seconds).  Viewers may feel the same way until a pivotal scene alters our perception, not only about what’s taking place in the courtroom but about the film as well, as there’s an extended flashback argument between the husband and wife that is wrought with tension, as both are writers, so the creative process is cleverly introduced into the film through a contentious relationship, where creative frustration, artistic ambition, and jealousy have a way of tearing them apart, feeling like something out of Bergman’s exhaustingly detailed television drama Scenes from a Marriage (Scener ur ett äktenskap) (1973), which sheds light on a decades worth of emotional upheavals that are shown in excruciating detail.  This film takes an unsettling psychological journey into the depths of Samuel (Samuel Theis) and Sandra’s conflicted relationship, as she reveals secrets about her past life and her turbulent relationship with her husband, where sexual and artistic insecurity play a large part, planting obstacles as an excuse for failure, which are only magnified in this trial and put in the spotlight, as Sandra exhibits both a sense of inner calm, while also going full throttle in moments of explosive rage.  She is right, however, that none of these singular moments alone define a person, as an entire life and marriage constitute a string of moments, where the sum of the parts provide a more accurate portrait.  Nonetheless, the prosecutor bases much of his argument on the underlying motivation behind Sandra’s written works, singling out specific texts where a character despises her weak husband and fantasizes about killing him, suggesting it draws from her own life and amounts to an autobiographical confession, though she exclusively writes works of fiction.  This exact same thing happens in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s LA VÉRITÉ (1960), as she is being judged not on the evidence but on her morality, for which she remains thoroughly unapologetic, as she is attacked for being promiscuous and bisexual, something that would be unthinkable for male writers, exposing inherently misogynistic prejudices in the legal system.  The extensive time in the claustrophobic courtroom allows viewers to get the full impact of this extraordinary scene, where the range of emotion continually escalates while the marital arguments and counterarguments resemble that of the trial.  Daniel sits through this courtroom drama and is exposed to these same revelations that the audience hears, but this is his family, so hearing some of the ugly secrets for the very first time has a strange effect on him, and his unexpected response says so much about this film, as he has perhaps the most superlative moment in the film, which evokes a dramatic silence of profound implications, yet he’s just an 11-year old kid, played with admirable fragility, where his witness testimony sends shivers through the spine for its utter clarity and innocence of spirit.  He’s at the heart of the film as well, becoming associated with a familiar Spanish theme that he furiously plays on the piano, Leyenda by Albeniz in HD - Andres Segovia YouTube (7:00), but is sidelined for a good part of it as a passive spectator, where the crux of the film may be seen through his eyes, so when he speaks up the results are staggering.  Written by the director with her partner Arthur Harari, having two children together, while also sharing writing credits on her previous film Sibyl (2019), Triet is a member of the French gender equality group Collectif 50/50, which also includes Jacques Audiard, Bertrand Bonello, Alice Diop, Céline Sciamma, Léa Seydoux, and Rebecca Zlotowski, and in her controversial awards speech at Cannes, she criticized French President Emmanuel Macron’s highly unpopular change to the country’s retirement age and his suppression of the mass protests from the pension reform protest movement, as France has one of the lowest retirement ages of any industrialized country, while also having one of the lowest pension rates of any European country.  Perhaps because of this, Triet’s film was passed over as the French selection for Best International Film, instead choosing Vietnamese-born director Tran Anh Hung’s culinary romance THE TASTE OF THINGS starring French favorites Juliette Binoche and Benoit Magimel.