 |
| 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.
