Vague Visages’ Red Rooms review contains minor spoilers. Pascal Plante’s 2023 movie features Juliette Gariépy, Laurie Babin and Elisabeth Locas. Check out the VV home page for more film reviews.

Red rooms, for the uninitiated, are among the nastiest corners of the internet. Existing predominantly on the so-called “dark web,” they’re essentially chat rooms where users gather to watch unspeakable acts live, including — most notably — murder and sexual assault. Cyber Hell: Exposing an Internet Horror (2022), an effective yet undeniably chilling Netflix documentary, explores one such case from South Korea which involves a whole bunch of horrible men gathering to gleefully watch vulnerable, and typically underage, women humiliate and degrade themselves. The police investigation dragged on for years because it’s so tough to prosecute these kinds of cases, let alone find the culprits. Fortunately, Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms starts with an alleged offender already in custody — accused of the horrific public murders of three teenage girls — as the trial begins and one mysterious woman waits in the wings, patiently watching it all unfold. 

Red Rooms stars Juliette Gariépy as Kelly-Anne, a twenty-something who’s so dedicated to the trial that she sleeps on the adjacent street the night before to ensure a good spot in the public gallery. The courtroom is a stark, modernist and mostly white space that resembles an art exhibit more than anything else, which adds to the clinical nature of the proceedings. It’s a far cry from the camp grandiosity of Anatomy of a Fall (2023) — an easy comparison given that Red Rooms is also a French-language film and centers around a horrific and confounding case. Right off the bat, the jury is given a trigger warning about “extremely explicit and violent” evidence. If they want to leave rather than continuing with their civic duty, the presiding judge completely understands. This is despite the fact that, due to the media circus around the case, it was incredibly difficult to source jury members in the first place.

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One suspects that Kelly-Anne would’ve happily volunteered her time. The model, who’s also a bit of a computer genius on the side, is rapt with attention as every horrible detail is read aloud. It’s unclear what her connection to the case is, if any, or whether Kelly-Anne is just a murder tourist like the peppy Clementine (Laurie Babin), who’s convinced of the accused man’s innocence simply because she’s madly in love with him. Clementine, along with the distracting ultra-goth extra sat next to Kelly-Anne in the tiny courtroom, is who usually springs to mind when most people think of dark tourism. The protagonist seems like a normal young woman with a flourishing career who, although antisocial, warms to the loquacious Clementine enough to let her crash with her. But the question remains: why is Kelly-Anne so interested in this horrible murder case in the first place? 

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Clementine’s perspective stands out in Red Rooms, because she constantly reiterates it unprompted to anyone who’ll listen, including the press, with Babin’s skilled performance striking a clever balance between irritating and pathetic. Her character could be a complete nutter or, god help us, the dreaded empath with too much time on her hands. But Kelly-Anne’s motivations remain frustratingly murky right up until Red Rooms’ climax. It’s disappointing that writer-director Plante doesn’t quite manage to stick the landing because he ratchets the tension up very effectively. Red Rooms also loses steam when the action moves outside the courtroom, even though Kelly-Anne’s creepily minimalistic apartment is a great setting to unravel the most disturbing elements of the case, including the tapes of the murders that were posted online for a baying, and paying, audience. 

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Although Plante ruthlessly dissects how desensitized we’ve become to real-life violence, thanks in large part to the proliferation of true crime, he wisely doesn’t show any violence onscreen in Red Rooms. Instead, the detailed courtroom descriptions are sufficient (the prowling camera of cinematographer Vincent Biron makes great use of the space while simultaneously creating a claustrophobic feel), along with the devastated reactions of the victims’ families. Likewise, when Kelly-Anne watches the videos at home, the shot remains focused on her face as it’s bathed in an eerie red glow. Gariépy plays Kelly-Anne as a complete control freak, to the extent that she doesn’t have anybody else in her life besides a hacked AI assistant with a comforting British accent. When she’s watching these horrible real-life events, the veneer barely cracks, almost as though Kelly-Anne is simply reading code or figuring out how to win her next online poker game. She’s calculated in every aspect of her existence, and when Clementine questions why she’s so drawn to the trial, Kelly-Anne doesn’t even bother mustering up a response.

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Red Rooms’ strongest moments occur inside the court. The bravura 20-minute opening section is throat-constricting in its intensity even though it’s dialogue-heavy (crucially, without utilizing the gruesome crime scene photos that have become so depressingly normalized in true crime docuseries). It’s a relief when the action moves outside in Red Rooms, but Plante never fully regains that sense of unease, aside from a stomach-churning sequence involving a live talk show and another, late in the game, moment when Kelly-Anne takes drastic measures to make her point. It’s a terrific example of emotional violence that’s more impactful than all the gore in the Terrifier series combined. In fact, the whole movie could’ve been confined to the court room, and it arguably would’ve been stronger as a result since it all kind of builds up to nothing. Perhaps Plante wasn’t sure how to end Red Rooms without veering into sensationalism, which is commendable, but it doesn’t solve the problem of crafting an intriguing reason for why Kelly-Anne is so driven.

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The score, meanwhile, weirdly resembles Ren Faire music and grows increasingly intrusive as the movie drags on, suggesting that Plante doesn’t trust his audience to know how to feel. Or maybe he doesn’t have the self-confidence as a filmmaker to let the action speak for itself. Red Rooms’ subject matter is knotty, and the writer-director does a fine job of forcing viewers to confront how we perceive violent crimes and then distance ourselves from them so we can continue with our days as normal. However, Plante doesn’t take a stance either way on why people like Kelly-Anne become so embroiled in these kinds of cases — why they actively seek out the most horrific details, and how it impacts the rest of their lives. Maybe it’s simply too thorny of an issue, one that’s evolving all the time, for him to definitively say either way. 

Joey Keogh (@JoeyLDG) is a writer from Dublin, Ireland with an unhealthy appetite for horror movies and Judge Judy. In stark contrast with every other Irish person ever, she’s straight edge. Hello to Jason Isaacs.

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