“My thoughts are with the victims.”
Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) like her internet nom de plume and computer desktop wallpaper The Lady of Shallot lives in a tower overlooking Montreal. She is seen and unseen. A fashion model known for her risk-taking work and a passionless gambler collecting bitcoin because “Money is just numbers in computers and I’m good with numbers.”
Something that has caught her gaze in the mortal realm is the case of a serial killer Ludovich Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos) who tortured, defiled, and mutilated (and filmed the acts for auction on the dark web) three girls aged sixteen and under. Kelly-Anne claims she is attending the trial because she is curious to see Cheavlier – but her curiosity is enigmatic and later obsessive.
The trial of ‘The Demon of Rosemont’ is something Montreal has not dealt with before – discovering ‘Red Rooms’ and the business of live snuff available to anonymous people is not the stuff of urban legend but tragically real. Footage of the abject and unimaginably violent fates of two of the young girls has been uncovered. Juliette Roy, and Kim Leblanc. The footage of the third, and youngest victim, thirteen-year-old Camille Beaulieu, is missing. Her remains have been discovered on Chevalier’s property.
Director Pascal Plante’s elegant opening sequence in the brightly lit and sterile courtroom is a masterclass in building slow horror and fascination. Every piece of information relayed in the opening statement by the Crown speaks of acts that must be seen to believed in their real-world existence. Yet, to bear witness to such horrors is a burden. The footage of the other two girls will be shown to the jury and the Crown Prosecutor claims, “Watching it once was too much.” The camera circles the courtroom taking in the grieving families, the prosecution and defence, the journalists and public gallery members, and Chevalier himself in his glass cage. As the defence is giving his opening argument (one that relies on ‘reasonable doubt’ as Chevalier didn’t appear without a mask) the camera slowly focuses on Kelly-Anne and her beautiful face while Domonique Plante’s unnerving score drowns out his words.
Outside the court journalists are interviewing a disturbed young woman, Clementine (Laurie Babin) who has fallen in love with Chevalier. Her frantic arguments protesting his innocence are clearly nonsensical. Clementine is representative of those who go down the rabbit hole of conspiracy with crime, who find an excuse, however flimsy, to protect their obsession. An odd friendship evolves between Kelly-Anne and Clementine with the former inviting her into her sparsely furnished apartment to stay. Kelly-Anne doesn’t say anything to support Clementine’s delusions of Chevalier’s innocence, she also doesn’t argue against them remaining quietly neutral.
Clementine is fascinated by Kelly-Anne’s odd lifestyle. Her computers and reprogrammed Siri/Alexa styled assistant Guinevere which Kelly-Anne has kept from the bulk of the internet because it began as racist and sociopathic. Now it tells jokes. Kelly-Anne tries to protect Clementine from herself when she calls into a comedy panel show called ‘More Catholic Than the Pope’ about Chevalier. Clementine is humiliated – trying to explain she’s not crazy. Kelly-Anne is as sympathetic as she knows how to be.
As the trial progresses Camille’s mother Francine’s (Élisabeth Locas) distress and exhaustion is heightened by the presence of people like Clementine (and she believes Kelly-Anne) the true crime junkies and groupies who “are spitting on our daughters’ graves.” When it comes time for the jury to watch the recordings of the deaths of Juliette and Kim the judge orders the room cleared. Clementine laments she needs to see the tapes to prove that they are doctored, and Chevalier cannot be responsible for the crimes. Kelly-Anne lets slip that she has seen them, and they aren’t something Clementine can handle. Clementine insists and her world is shattered by the disgusting truth. The man she had a hybristophiliac fascination with goes beyond her fantasy limitations and the woman she tentatively trusted is a well of blackness she can’t fathom. “Why are you here, Kelly-Anne?” she asks as she leaves to go back to her small town.
Why are you here, Kelly-Anne is a question which Plante refuses to answer until near the end of the film, but in the space in between he pushes the audience into the extremity of society’s own preoccupation with violent crime. Kelly-Anne is a sophisticated blank – a model who shapeshifts fitting into a seductively dark aesthetic. The most disturbing shapeshifting she employs is to dress as Camille in court, blonde hair and retainer, to capture the attention of Chevalier. He sees her and desires her more profoundly than anyone consuming her fashion image ever could.
Pascal Plante never shows the audience the videos that were streamed on the dark web for paying customers and yet he dares us… do you want to see the horror? Are you also a voyeur? Do you want to see beyond the shadows? For a moment, despite what we know is being committed on those recordings, some of us will be tempted to look. Murder is an industry for so many: from true crime fanatics to the media cycle and continual public speculation, and far beyond.
“The mirror crack’d from side to side” when the Lady of Shallot glanced at the Knight (Chevalier) Lancelot and a curse came upon her leading to her death. Kelly-Anne’s isolation in her apartment tower is not dissimilar to that of the tragic Arthurian lady –what she feels for her Chevalier can’t be called ‘love’ – but it can be read as the trigger that leads her to go beyond the half-sick of shadows of a world built of screens, reflections, and anonymous mirrors into an equally broken world.
Red Rooms is a taught and often confounding thriller as we puzzle over the true motivations of Kelly-Anne with her lovely face and shifting psychological transference. Juliette Gariépy is mysterious and disturbing as a woman whose boundaries and motivations are obscure right up to the end. Even when there is some kind of resolution as to why she has done what she has done, risking both her livelihoods, what drove her to it is something Plante leaves the audience to infer.
A disturbing and unique crime thriller, Red Rooms is provocative and polished. Impeccably stylish and atmospheric; Red Rooms imprints itself on the viewer like a maddening nightmare.
Streaming Availability:Director: Pascal Plante
Cast: Juliette Gariépy, Laurie Babin, Elisabeth Locas
Writer: Pascal Plante
Producer: Dominique Dussault
Music: Vincent Biron
Editor: Jonah Malak
