We sat down with the Red Rooms writer-director to talk sociopathy, true crime, and why he doesn’t like being compared to David Fincher…
Pascal Plante, unsurprisingly, isn’t a fan of true crime.
His third feature, Red Rooms, is a character study of a young woman, Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) who develops an unhealthy fascination with a man on trial for the torture and murder of three teenage girls in a wintery Quebec. Sleeping outside the courthouse night after night, she spends her days playing online poker and scouring the dark web for the evidence that will prove a man’s guilt or innocence once and for all.
There, she meets Clémentine – another young woman whose obsession with the killer takes on a more parasocial dimension. She gives conspiracy-filled interviews to the media, loudly proclaiming his innocence while his eyes bore into her head from behind a wall of glass.
We sat down with the writer-director to find out more about the very 21st century courtroom film which might just be the most affecting thriller of the year…
Where did the inspiration for Red Rooms come from?
There was a vague idea back roughly a decade ago now, which was the idea for a serial killer thriller from the vantage point of the satellite macrocosm that gravitates around them. You see so many films about the killers, where it’s either the investigation on the one end or the portrait of the killer. But there’s a third component that felt that was similarly lacking in terms of good fiction films or even books – I don’t like either word, but for lack of better words, let’s call them groupies, or fans…
What is it that you don’t like about them?
It just feels like there’s a negative connotation to them. To make a film that at least tries to be relevant, I needed not to judge these people. I don’t love [the term ‘groupie’], because I think it’s reductive as a term. The idea of having two leads in the film – or one lead and a very important secondary character – it shows that there’s a spectrum.
Kelly-Anne is very much on the sociopathic end of the spectrum. There’s a term, hybristophilia, which describes people who are literally turned on by horrible crimes. But with Clémentine, I wanted to have a character that’s the exact opposite.
How did Kelly-Anne’s character emerge, then?
So, I did lots of research about, quote-unquote, “groupies,” but I went to the more extreme side to shape her basic behaviour. She’s also someone who is a major adrenaline seeker. Everything she does, whether it’s gambling, what she does in the courtroom, or home invading, it’s all part of somebody a bit dead inside that needs these big rushes to feel alive.
But it was actually fun at one point to make her a bit otherworldly. In the first draft of the screenplay, people kept comparing her to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. And, I mean, being compared to Fincher is always good. He’s a filmmaker I like, but I don’t worship at his altar every day, you know what I mean? Whenever there’s a quote [comparing to Fincher], the distributors would slap that on the poster, and I’m like, “Oh my goodness”…
Read more: Red Rooms review | A true crime Taxi Driver for the 21st century
There are flashes of empathy in there, which sort of make her more disturbing in a way…
And [that ties into the] clashing aesthetics within the film. It starts very mechanical, mathematical, almost just like the brain of that character. This is how her brain sees the world, and the camera embraces that.
[But then there’s] the solitude, how much solitude can one endure, even a sociopath, an introvert? So Clementine comes into play, and then you have a more handheld shot. It’s a bit looser in terms of the staging and the framing. Then she becomes a bit paranoid, and it’s almost like a robot glitching.
Has making Red Rooms changed your relationship to violence on film, true crime stories and that sort of thing?
I wasn’t a fan of true crime when I started. I think I’m even less of a fan now. And I don’t want to put words in the mouth of the actresses, but I did a lot of promo with them. And Juliette, before even doing the casting and the auditions, she was into a lot of podcasts – not as much the Netflix documentaries, but lots of podcasts. And she cold stopped after doing the film.
But my relationship with all that… Well, first, it’s a fictional killer. And not nominally a fictional killer, it’s purposely a fictional killer. The types of crime he does, the way he looks, they’re not at all linked to a real one, because we didn’t want to do any sort of promotional piggybacking on something horrible. The ethical beef that I have with so many Netflix things is they would put a white on black at the end, like: “Oh yeah, we think about the victims”, but you just spent six hours having a hard-on about that, you know? It’s so nuts. They’re narcissistic arsehole monsters – if we give them a six hour show on the most subscribed platform on the planet, they win.
Red Rooms is in UK cinemas from 6th September.
