Red Rooms

I first watched Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms months ago upon its Canadian release, and it was with no shortage of dread that I sat down to watch it again in preparation to write this review. This isn’t because the movie is bad, but because it so rattled me on my first viewing that I felt a legitimate pit in my stomach at the prospect of experiencing its twisted plot turns once more.

A French-Canadian psychological thriller, writer/director Plante’s film follows young professional model Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy in a nightmarish performance) as she becomes increasingly obsessed with the high-profile Montreal trial of serial killer Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), whose gut-churning crimes are laid out in excruciating verbal detail during a riveting opening scene that places us in the sterile fluorescence of the courtroom for an extended, unbroken single take.

As we, the audience, recoil at the plainspoken and seemingly endless details of the case, the frame slowly zeroes in on Kelly-Anne, observing the trial from the stands like a spectator sport with fangirlish focus and fascination. She is—whether we like it or not—who we will experience this story through for the film’s nearly two-hour runtime. It’s quite the ride.

To reveal much else about the plot from there would be a large disservice, but one of the neatest magic tricks of Red Rooms is how Plante’s haunting screenplay and Gariépy’s gutsy performance hold our intrigue while also daring to refuse us the narrative comfort of excavating Kelly-Anne’s interiority. There’s never an “aha” moment when her psychological motivations are unearthed. We can only begin to assume what makes her tick.

Some may find this to be a point of frustration, but for others, it will be a key factor in what makes the film so effective. We don’t really know what moves Kelly-Anne to do what she does, and that fact makes her actions all the more disquieting—including one toward Red Room’s conclusion that could be classified as perversely virtuous.