The Poppies of Terra #38 - Red Rooms

Avoid, at all costs, rooms referred to by their colors. The Blue Room (2014)–desire, guilt, and crime, à la Simenon. Green Room (2015)–welcome to neo-Nazi hell, with a very mean-spirited Patrick Stewart. Even if the mere entrance is chromatic, the space is likely problematic–as in Insidious: The Red Door (2023).

And now Red Rooms (Les Chambres Rouges, written and directed by Pascal Plante), a Canadian production, joins this troubled architectural array. It played at various film festivals in 2023 and is currently available in select theaters across the U.S., awaiting your discovery.

The film begins with disarming simplicity, but rapidly accrues details that have a hypnotic effect, because we can’t grasp how they’re related but we’re inspired to believe by the filmmaking confidence and tonal specificity that these hidden maps of meaning will in time be unveiled. A young woman named Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) wakes up on the street. She is well-kempt and precise in her movements. She enters a building that requires a security check and proceeds to take a back row seat at a trial. We’re in Montreal. A man named Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos) is being charged with brutally murdering three female adolescents and broadcasting his heinous deeds through a live feed available to select dark web users. We hear, in full, the opening statements of both legal teams. We glimpse the accused himself, who is confined, almost Hannibal-Lecter-like, to a transparent enclosure protruding into the sleek, high-tech courtroom. Chevalier sits staring off, disaffected, dissociated. Why is Kelly-Anne here? She guaranteed she'd be one of the first in. What’s her stake? 

Shortly after the first trial sequence, Kelly-Anne collides with a brash young girl named Clementine. They are opposites in every way–Kelly-Anne beautiful, elegant, poised, well-to-do, composed, uninterested in camera interviews, Clementine bug-eyed, lanky, jangly, poor, overwrought, happy to speak to the media–except for their fascination with the fate of Chevalier. Clementine, it soon becomes clear, is on Chevalier’s side. Whenever she has the chance, she espouses her conviction that Chevalier has been set up by a corrupt system, that the evidence against him, far from being incontrovertible, could have, and therefore was, easily faked, and that people, really, should be ashamed of themselves for being so quick to judge. Kelly-Anne’s position remains less defined. Several times she discreetly prods at Clementine’s arguments, demonstrating a keenness of perception and sly verbal strategy, while never volunteering her own point of view.

Kelly-Anne, we discover, lives in a luxury apartment, works as a fashion model, and plays poker online. Clementine, meanwhile, has hitchhiked her way to the city and has nowhere to stay. They run into each other several times, and after Kelly-Anne thaws a bit, Clementine manages to make Kelly-Anne do something she appears to rarely do in her solitary, regimented life of protein shakes, strict exercise routines, and methodical online interactions. Clementine makes Kelly-Anne smile. It’s brief, but meaningful. A new conundrum.

Plante’s crafty direction recalls, sans some of the fussiness, the multi-layered David Fincher of Gone Girl (2014), another twisting narrative where we immediately sense that things are not as they appear. The titular “red rooms,” the urban myth locations where crimes such as Chevalier’s alleged atrocities unfold in cyberspace, invoke the seediness of Joel Schumacher’s 8mm (1999), suitably encrypted and Bitcoined for the modern age. The courthouse setup has an aura about it of Justine Triet’s runaway critical success, Anatomy of a Fall (2023), which is also in French. Kelly-Anne’s online life, and the richly conceived details we witness on the screen, bring to mind Searching (2018) and Missing (2023), which manage to color in entire existences and motivations with mere pixels. And it’s hard not to think, in connection with Ludovic, the charged man’s first name, of Kubrick’s steely A Clockwork Orange (1971) and its infamous Ludovico technique. Recent films, like the stylish Blink Twice, and the rollicking non-linear Strange Darling, seem to signal a new appetite for fare that’s not straight horror but contains more violence, sensory, graphic, or both, than the mind-benders of days past.

Is Red Rooms a thriller? A courtroom melodrama? A cyber conspiracy theory neo-noir? A procedural meta-commentary on our obsession with true crime? An allegory for celebrity culture, parasocial projections, and our fragmentation into manipulable cohorts? Juliette Gariépy’s magnetic performance as Kelly-Anne, which instantly pulls us in by eschewing almost every inflection of emotion, Vincent Biron’s stunning cinematography, Laura Nhem’s austere production design, and Dominique Plante’s subtle but engrossing score, all combine to make this movie more than the sum of the above parts. Enigma and tension move perfectly in sync, ratcheting up the tension all the way through the final frame. We realize then that, unlike so many other suspense vehicles, Red Rooms plays fair. The ending is an assertion of psyche rather than a pulpy revelation of plot. The misdirection lies in our presupposition of it. That’s how the best magic works.