Red Rooms (2023) Movie Review: Predators, Parasites, and the Horrors We Consume

Consuming a movie implies both the immediate pleasure you take from it and the amount of time and energy you spend to really engage with it. This might be lost on studios and streamers that are constantly trying to get everyone to binge the next hot entry and move on, but it’s the real price of watching in most cases. Pascal Plante’s “Red Rooms” (2023), a film that provoked fervent debates regarding its disturbed protagonist and her true aims, really gets the type of dark imagery and behavior that fascinates audiences, obviously for all the wrong reasons. However, it also functions as a mirror, in one of the finest executed feats of a filmmaker investing in the viewers’ psychological strength. And it’s not an image most true crime fans (or genre fans, for that matter) will be able to see and then shake off anytime soon.

Kelly-Anne is a resourceful model, a goal-oriented Internet denizen, and a skilled hacker (her poker-playing style definitely takes cues from social engineering). She is, for some reason left unrevealed, obsessed with the trial of Ludovic Chevalier – a man accused of murdering three girls in one of the infamous dark web ‘red rooms’. She attends the courtroom sessions, and the viewer is asked, in turn, to observe her every move. In the early scenes, she’s just a person interested in the case. Is she one of those serial-killer “groupies”? Her expression can quickly change from fascination to contempt to pity, arriving at total annoyance. Gradually, Kelly-Anne reveals herself to be a formidable, albeit twisted individual pursuing an elusive digital item. Obtaining it will mean careful planning and great personal sacrifice.

Pascal Plante has said he wanted to make a project about how people consume and become obsessed with true crime, and also have Kelly-Anne be as fascinating as possible. The movie starts as a loaded courtroom drama, stopping to deliver a few dark fashion freak-out moments and copious “elite hacker in walled-off private fortress” aesthetics. Lead actor Juliette Gariepy pulls off a mesmerizingly chameleonic performance, juggling all facets, suggesting a character who hides deep emotional turmoil. Early on, Kelly-Anne meets Clementine, a conspiracy theorist who believes Chevalier is completely innocent.

She is warm, approachable, and forgiving, and she makes Kelly-Anne laugh for a moment. They bond over random Chevalier trivia, one thing they’re both good at. Kelly-Anne shares a bit of her credo: the prosecutor is Clementine’s enemy, and you shouldn’t underestimate your enemies. Being an online poker pro is enjoyable because you get to see foolish players lose everything in a split second. You should train your AI companion locally, not use the default cloud settings like a newbie. The movie subverts female friendship tropes by having Kelly-Anne act as a dark mentor, and contrasting the behaviors of Chevalier, Clementine, and Kelly-Anne becomes a new favorite habit for the already-engrossed viewer.

Plante and his team also know their hacking tools and Internet culture well enough for “Red Rooms” to work as a pure techno-thriller. Kelly-Anne downloads a data leak and uses the password in the file to essentially bypass an electronic door lock. Earlier, she checks if an email address belonging to the mother of one of the victims has been ‘owned’, or ‘pwned’, using the ‘Have I been pwned?’ website (if you’ve used that yourself and gotten scared that you were compromised, don’t worry, data leaks are just very frequent nowadays). An expert discusses using Tor as a means to access the dark web and how streaming on Tor has become a possibility in recent years. Finally, Kelly-Anne uses a port scanner app on her mobile phone.

Red Rooms (2023) Movie — A still from “Red Rooms” (2023)

“Red Rooms” makes little attempt to hide its social commentary about the damage technology, screens, and watching the wrong kind of imagery can cause to an individual. The prosecutor remarks that asking the jury to watch the execution videos is to inflict something on them. In turn, the defense lawyer admits that they strike at one’s soul. The media describes Chevalier as monstrous and greedy, but the circus surrounding the case is infuriating to watch. Kelly-Anne herself is the perfect parasite for the modern age, which might just be a thing some of the viewers secretly aspire to be.

A quick crypto transaction here, a call in an online poker match, and she doesn’t ever have to worry about putting food on the table. The fashion shoots are just there for her to have a “cover”, a public life, some prestige, and a way to explore her edgy side. The movie exposes the ‘edgelord’ mentality so prevalent in online forums, but other than the ‘griefing’ (deriving pleasure from provoking suffering unto others) it seems that Kelly-Anne has resisted internalizing most of it. She is an expert multitasker and infiltrator. But the movie never really lets you forget the cost of her sacrificing so much to the Chevalier case. It only becomes that much more apparent in the brutal final act.

It’s worth discussing that any person interested in darkness, like Kelly-Anne, will tell a story about themselves, and the world will tell a different story. Kelly-Anne’s online handle is ‘LadyOfShalott’, a reference to the poem by Alfred Tennison about a woman who lives secluded in a tower, cursed to never be able to look at Camelot directly, nor at the love of her life, the knight Lancelot (Chevalier means ‘knight’ in French, so the Redditors who theorized that Kelly-Anne was in love with the serial-killer at least have that going for them).

The curse here might just mean a boring, normal 9-to-5 life. The screen Kelly-Anne uses to interact with the world is the lady’s tapestry from the poem. And in the first half, the film’s soundtrack even resembles something you’d hear at a medieval fair. But Kelly-Anne seems too pragmatic to just claim an old tale and live it. It’s possible that she is so calculating and sadistic that even this online identity is just another cover, and Plante clearly toys with this aspect, providing some genuinely disturbing moments as food for thought.

Another possibility is that Kelly-Anne has really high psychological strength, or what is called “psychological capital” or “psycap”. It’s what allows people to see hope and a path forward in most situations. Kelly-Anne’s rationality and predatory behavior mean she’s not really that hopeful, but the final half reveals she’s not that impenetrable either. Early on, she shows some empathy while mentoring Clementine, but the movie’s denouement is a falling-down-the-rabbit-hole nightmare, upping the levels of paranoia, having her lose and regain her composure, acting erratically and out of character.

Here, the movie borrows aspects of ARGs (Alternate Reality Games, in which players are given tasks to complete in the real world to progress in the game world). There’s a roleplaying scene that will have you talking for days, a make-or-break moment for the film. It is this larger part in which some viewers might find themselves “on Kelly-Anne’s side”, because her surroundings are just that bleak, her behavior unhinged and because Plante is adept at exploiting the psycap (this might also be why there are so many theories online that Kelly-Anne is the hero, but psycap is good at having us root for anti-heroes too).

Here’s a tantalizing easter egg: in the movie’s climax, with the tension rising to unbearable levels thanks to Dominique Plante’s ritualistic drum beats, Kelly-Anne, in a blink-and-you ‘ll-miss-it moment, types excerpts from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in a chatroom. In particular, the part where Robin Starveling talks about how hard it is to represent something greater than yourself (the moon). Robin is holding a lantern, so he must be at least part of the moon, even if he is not. The play’s symbolism being used as a parallel to Kelly-Anne’s situation might be an important point of analysis. If she is acting, is she in control of the stage? Does she post one of the verses in all-caps to mock the other members of the chatroom, or to scream in despair at how far she’s fallen?

A borderline-arthouse film with a unique look and feel, boasting a compelling protagonist, an intriguing mystery, and a killer lead performance to boot, “Red Rooms” is a daring new entry in a genre ecosystem that, after the pandemic innovations, has reverted to what works best. Horror movies are a thriving industry, and the main focus is to entertain. A project like “Red Rooms” that combines true artistic beauty with tangible, potent horror is rare. You can only compare it to the best of the best – “Saint Maud,” “Come True,” “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.” “Red Rooms” has enough going for it that you can just watch and enjoy it, maybe get mildly disturbed and vow to never watch it again.

But if you really sit with it, you will find that Plante has prepared the same path for the viewer as the one Kelly-Anne follows. The realization that we should stop and dissect what we’re often mindlessly enjoying eventually settles in because parts of “Red Rooms” work both as a classic fairytale and as a metaphor for completely erasing one’s self for the sake of pleasure. Are we close to becoming the hero as well as the monster in our own stories, because that’s just how the world works today? Or do we have our own desires to blame?

Plante seems to have the final laugh with that final scene, a truly disturbing moment if there ever was one, and a crowning moment of achievement for Gariepy. Judge others not, obsess not, idolize not, because people are complex, and our paths might be more similar than we thought. And just like the camera moves away from Kelly-Anne in the final seconds to reveal the proverbial ray of light reflected in a window, maybe that path lies far away from all the daily horror on our screens.