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.   

Only the River Flows (He bian de cuo wu)

 

Director Wei Shujun

Author Yu Hua

ONLY THE RIVER FLOWS (He bian de cuo wu)              B+                                                  China  (101 mi)  2023  d:  Wei Shujun

There’s no understanding fate; therefore I choose to play the part of fate.  I wear the foolish, unintelligible, face of a professional god.                                                                                        —Albert Camus, opening film quote from his play Caligula, 1944, part of his Cycle of the Absurd

Premiering in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival before becoming an arthouse box office hit in China, this heavily stylish, neo-noir murder mystery was shot on 16mm in the Zhejiang and Jiangxi Provinces, apparently the first mainland Chinese movie to be shot on film in years, where the film stock had to be scanned and printed in Taiwan, given a beautifully dark and murky look with desaturated colors by cinematographer Chengma Zhiyuan.  Reminiscent of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s neo-noir horror film CURE (1997), and the psychological crime thrillers of Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder (Salinui chueok) (2003) and Diao Yinan’s Black Coal, Thin Ice (Bai ri yan huo) (2014), this was adapted by Wei and Kang Chunlei, who also has a prominent role as a suspected murderer in the film, from Yu Hua’s morally ambiguous short story in his 1988 compilation Mistakes by the River.  A rapper turned filmmaker, having majored in sound recording from the Communication University of China in Beijing, Wei is the only post-90’s Chinese director to have been selected three times for the Cannes Film Festival, working with different combinations of screenwriters on every project, but his earlier film Striding Into the Wind (Ye Ma Fen Zong) (2020), ironically about a sound recordist, left something to be desired, an aimless and empty slacker comedy that was admittedly offbeat and quirky, not something you typically see from China.  Yet here what immediately grabs one’s attention is Emil Gilels coolly playing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-Sharp Minor, Op. 27 No ... YouTube (6:10), the same pensive piece used in Edward Yang’s Yi Yi: A One and a Two... (2000), while the everpresent flashlight was also prominently featured in Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day (Gu ling jie shao nian sha ren shi jian) (1991).  Opening in December 1995, the film takes place in a small rural town with only 50 homes, where a murder has been committed along the shoreline of a nearby river, with a woman known locally as Granny No. 4 (Yang Cao) emerging as the victim.  By setting the film in this time period, occurring between the events of Tiananmen Square and the more recent economic boom, it evokes a period just before technology brought changes to forensic science, evidenced by boxed desktop computers, cassette tapes, transistor radios, Polaroid photographs, and incessant indoor smoking, a time when citizens led a repressed and silent life, when adherence to social norms was the most important thing, often pushing people to shame and secrecy, yet it was also a time when everyone did everything together, like eat, work, play, where socialization was done face to face, as opposed to now when everybody is isolated on their phones.  The police chief (Hou Tianlai) has given his squad a vast new headquarters in a broken down movie theater that has fallen into disuse (audience attendance in China was at an all-time low in the mid 90’s, so the government decided to allow screenings of Hollywood films), providing an office in what was the projection booth, surrounded by broken projectors and abandoned reels, symbolic, perhaps, that what we’re watching is not always reality, urging his lead detective, Ma Zhe (Zhu Yilong) to wrap things up quickly, as all eyes of the Party bosses are on this case, determined to prevent another serial killer like Andrei Chikatilo, who sexually assaulted, murdered, and mutilated at least fifty-two women and children between 1978 and 1990.  More concerned with appearances and the incarceration of the presumed murderer than any motives that may have driven the crime, the Party assumes the role of the protector of society.  What really stands out, however, is the self-reflective quality of the film, a poignant character study of a man who’s finding it increasingly difficult to ascertain truth and justice, as the conventions of a detective movie start breaking down, placing us directly into the mindset of Ma Zhe, perhaps as much to do with existential angst as the solving of a murder, with offbeat flashes of wry humor and no traces of any graphic violence, while the investigation team is busily stabbing pig carcasses to see which blade may be the most similar to the murder weapon.  The camera revisits the scene of the crime from multiple perspectives, actually assuming the position of the murderer, with the victim showing no fear or apprehension by his presence.

Opening with a sequence in which a young boy dressed as a policeman and carrying a toy gun chases his friends around an upper floor through a maze of corridors of an abandoned building, opening and closing doors without finding anyone, until he reaches a door which dangerously opens into the emptiness of free-falling space, where there is a precipitous drop down to the rubble of a construction site below, with the child seen staring out into the abyss, a premonition, perhaps, of the detective coming up blank in his search for answers, yet otherwise having no relation to the story, and the boy is never seen again, with the unfinished construction reflective of a time when the rapid development across small villages had come to a sudden halt.  All the director’s titles invoke spatial metaphors, not really the point in making the film, but somehow the people in the story connect to that physical space, becoming a thematic point of emphasis that viewers are drawn into.  Essentially a police procedural movie, like a puzzle piece, with Ma Zhe examining the murder site, interrogating witnesses, always accompanied by his more excitable second in command, Xie (Tong Linkai), while meticulously exploring the clues, with the film playing out as a work in progress.  Of peculiar interest is the overly descriptive name of one of the potential suspects, known only as the “madman” (Kang Chunlei), who has suddenly disappeared, someone the victim adopted after becoming a widow, something of the village idiot, instantly becoming a person of interest, but it’s rare for a name to connote such an ominous nature.  When he’s found, Ma Zhe’s interrogation techniques are not what we suspect, as the “madman” never utters a word, described by others as harmless, so the detective attempts a non-threatening approach, silently hanging around, observing from a distance, gathering what information he can, while still pursuing the evidence.  His arrest somewhere around the midway point seems to suggest the case has been solved, with Ma Zhe’s seemingly satisfied superior pondering “Why haven’t you wrapped up your report yet?”  Indicating he still needs to sort things out, this opens the eyes of viewers, who suspect more is lurking in the darkness.  A woman’s purse is discovered near the crime scene, containing cassettes of familiar pop songs, but at some point a woman’s voice breaks in, where she is clearly speaking to a secret lover, as the town’s buried secrets emerge, exposing a couple in a secret relationship and a gay hairdresser who tries to hide his identity, yet seemingly wants to be arrested, already having a criminal record for public indecency, described here as “violations of morality.”  Running down these leads proves to be difficult, and may not have anything to do with the case, but they are part of the process of moving from suspect to suspect, where the stress takes its toll on Ma Zhe’s professional and private life, as his wife Bai, Chloe Maayan from Lou Ye’s SUMMER PALACE (2006), Bi Gan’s 2019 Top Ten List #6 Long Day's Journey Into Night (Di qiu zui hou de ye wan) (2018), and Diao Yinan’s The Wild Goose Lake (Nan Fang Che Zhan De Ju Hui) (2019), is a primary school teacher who is expecting a baby, with the ultra sound informing them that this child may be suffering from an incurable congenital defect and might have cognitive development problems.  Coming against the background of a mentally challenged suspect and possible murderer, also strained by the effects of China’s one-child policy, Ma Zhe suggests she have an abortion, but his wife thinks otherwise, turning into a debate about the value of life, becoming an aggravating source of tension between them, as he’s completely invested in the murder case, but she is seen calmly attempting to put together a gigantic jigsaw puzzle of a mother and child, yet in a fit of rage, he flushes a few of the remaining pieces down the toilet.  Moments later, however, we see the entire puzzle framed on the wall with no pieces missing, completely at odds with reality.  In more mundane moments of domestic tranquility, watching them slurp noodles with chopsticks is a thing to behold, taking us back to filmmakers Wong Kar-wai and Hou Hsiao-hsien, where it was a signature trademark with both. 

Essentially a crime drama, what’s unique is the contemplative, existential aspect of the protagonist, where the root of his discomfort is never established, but is apparent throughout.  While his trustworthy dedication and loyalty to the job are never questioned, it’s his intelligence and adherence to rational thought that stands out, as Ma Zhe has a moral outlook that rises above his coworkers, as he is capable of seeing things they don’t, with lingering questions that dig deep into his soul, creating a personal conflict, yet the film is completely invested in his character, with all the moral ambiguities, taking us on a journey that continually feels overly understated and discreet, delving into unexplored territory, as facts and evidence become interlinked with subjective memory, pure conjecture, and even guesswork.  After the prisoner escapes and more murders occur, including a student poet and a young boy, the “madman” again becomes the focal point, but something interesting happens, as the psychological mindset of the criminal and the lead detective somehow merge, with Ma Zhe so obsessed with the case that he begins seeing the suspect everywhere, contaminating his mind, burrowing deep into his subconscious, undermining his police instincts, creating an impressionistic, off-kilter montage that seemingly takes place entirely in his imagination.  A turning point occurs when he falls asleep in an empty movie theater and experiences a surrealistic, David Lynch Twin Peaks style dream sequence, with each of the murder victims speaking to him, concocting an entirely different conclusion to the case, driven by a projector that bursts into flames, becoming a metaphor for the fallibility of truth.  This unexpected aspect of the film is quite surprising, taking us where few films are willing to go, essentially five minutes of an homage to cinema like few contemporary directors still dare to do, with a lead protagonist unraveling into a descent of madness, obsession, and personal isolation, as it defies all rationality and deductive reasoning typically associated with police work, instead creating a muddled netherworld that feels more symbolic than real, yet all the evidence is re-evaluated in this new light, filtered through an altered mindset, where it’s hard to distinguish between what’s real and what’s imagined.  This only heightens the mystery, drawing viewers into a mystifying unknown, yet the film inscrutably builds Ma Zhe’s character throughout, rarely seen without a cigarette, becoming familiar to us, where we appreciate what we know about him, as his integrity and ardent professionalism continually stand out, becoming the driving force of the film, dominating all that we see, yet there’s something else happening here, an undercurrent of doubt, with no cut and dry answers, which elevates this into unexplored territory, expressing a disarming honesty, becoming an unfinished and incomplete portrait of moral authority, which is rare in a police procedural.  This plays into Yu Hua’s literary vision, an author known for his abstract writing style, whose stories portray disturbing personal realities of modern China, accentuating the interplay of diverse meanings, particularly between imagination and reality, innocence and guilt, blurring the lines between postmodernism and tradition, often venturing into the absurd, examining the dark side of human psychology and society in a non-traditional way, with subjective storylines that investigate and illustrate the challenges of cultural disintegration and identity loss.  Defiantly ambiguous, this absorbing yet completely atmospheric crime drama is heavily punctuated by images of abandoned and neglected houses, narrow streets, and torrents of rain, apparently washing the sins away, generating a suffocating atmosphere that blurs the lines between good and evil, but the film’s exploration of complex social and moral themes, such as fetishes, identity, and the intricacies of human emotions, play a significant role in allowing viewers to draw their own conclusions.  This is a uniquely innovative film built upon a classical film noir structure, which looks to the past as a way of trying to understand the present, becoming an impressionistic mosaic on the ephemeral nature of truth, which is one of the more dangerously perplexing problems of modernity.