With spoilers, we look at Pascal Plante’s mesmerising thriller, Red Rooms, and how Arthurian legend might unlock the meaning of its final act.
NB: The following contains major spoilers for Red Rooms.
Most movies are predictable, which is fine. There’s an appeal in seeing, say, Tom Cruise stuck in a deadly situation and seeing how he figures his way out of it. There’s entertainment in knowing the staples of a genre and watching as a skillful storyteller works within them – or in the case of Red Rooms, intelligently breaks them.
In Canadian writer-director Pascal Plante’s thriller Red Rooms, protagonist Kelly-Ann’s desires and goals are left enigmatically obscure. What she wants, exactly what she’s thinking, what her motivations might be, are kept away from us – and for some, remain tantalisingly open to interpretation even at the end. Red Rooms is many things, but it’s seldom predictable.
Largely set in ultra-clean, modern interiors in an autumnal Montreal, Red Rooms plays with genre conventions in other ways. First, its murderer was caught long before the chilly opening credits; Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos) has been arrested for the kidnap and murder of three teenage girls. That he filmed himself committing his terrible crimes (albeit wearing a mask) and live-streamed the footage on the dark web suggests that proving his guilt in court will be relatively straightforward.
Model and pro poker player Kelly-Ann (Juliette Gariépy) has a strange obsession with the case. She sleeps outside the courtroom, night after night, to ensure she can grab one of the limited seats available to the public, then watches as the case unfolds each day, peering out from the back row with unblinking eyes. Plante then contrasts the solitary, coolly cerebral Kelly-Ann with Clementine (Laurie Babin), a younger, more naive woman who makes her own way into the courtroom each day because she somehow believes Chevalier is innocent; one of the victims’ parents angrily describes people like her as one of several ‘groupies’ whose presence in the hearing is an insult to their child’s memory.
Unlike Clementine, however, Kelly-Ann doesn’t think Chevalier is innocent. So what is it about the case that fascinates her so much? Genre convention might suggest she has some connection to the crimes; at one point, her attempts to use her skills as a computer hacker might suggest she’s doing her own investigations to help bring the killer to justice. Watchers and readers of modern thrillers will likely think back to Lizbeth Salander, the similarly solitary hacker from the Millennium books and their film adaptations (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and so forth).
Gradually, however, Plante peels back the layers to reveal a character who becomes more unsettling with each passing scene. That Kelly-Ann takes an almost sadistic pleasure in relieving strangers of their money during her online poker tournaments might be an early sign that something isn’t quite right. Then comes her admission that she’s actually seen two of the videos Chevalier filmed as he murdered his victims…
As well as a terrific slow-burn thriller, Red Rooms is also a particularly modern kind of character study, fitting in a long lineage that stretches back to Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader’s Taxi Driver from 1976 (as our own James Harvey pointed out in his review) but also takes in more recent movies like Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler (2014) and Rose Glass’s terrific Saint Maud (2019). All are about urban dislocation, and all are told from the warped perspective of their volatile, possibly even psychopathic central characters. They’re disturbed, disturbing people, but we can’t help but be swept along on their respective journeys.
Kelly-Ann’s odyssey takes in the urban legend of the film’s title – the so-called Red Rooms that are said to lurk in the darkest corners of the internet, where users exchange cryptocurrency in order to access horrendous acts of torture and even murder. Kelly-Ann, it seems, has long since disappeared down this rabbit hole, and become fascinated with Chevalier in the process.
Curiously, the legend of red rooms may exist in large part thanks to another Canadian filmmaker, David Cronenberg. His 1982 cult horror thriller, Videodrome, featured its own analogue version of the dark web – an elicit broadcast which could only be accessed by tuning into it with a powerful satellite receiver. A technician in the employ of seedy cable station executive Max Renn (a never-better James Woods) discovers the obscure broadcast one day and shows it to a transfixed Renn: called Videodrome, it’s little more than a red room (red because the walls are covered in damp clay) in which victims are bound, tortured and eventually murdered. The rest of the film becomes Renn’s attempts to find Videodrome’s origins – and what happens to his body and mind as the broadcast’s strange side effects begin to take hold.
Like Red Rooms, Videodrome is about our human fascination with taboo subjects, not least serial killers like Chevalier, and how that fascination can affect us. Much as the Videodrome broadcast acts like a curse on Max Renn, so Kelly-Ann’s obsession gradually alienates her from those in her orbit. A loner to begin with – aside from Clementine, she only speaks to people indirectly, or to her Alexa-like assistant, Guinevere – even these connections fall away as her life unravels. The key scene in this regard is the one where Clementine, on learning that Kelly-Ann has access to recordings of Chevalier’s crimes, insists that she watch them.
Eventually, Kelly-Ann relents, and Plante’s framing of the scene is perfect: a single, locked off shot of the two women side by side, gazing at the horror unfolding on the screen. For the most part, we can only hear the screams of the victim – and that’s because what’s being done in those videos is less relevant to the story than how the women react. Clementine, disgusted, breaks down; Kelly-Ann, who’s evidently seen it before, simply looks on with her lizard gaze.
The recordings finally break Chevalier’s hold over Clementine’s imagination. Disgusted, she makes the journey back home – perhaps also a little spooked by how calm Kelly-Ann is about the whole thing. Now alone, Kelly-Ann continues her courtroom visits, while in her apartment she gradually tracks down a third of the killer’s recordings – one so far unrecovered by the police, but which is up for sale in an online auction.
As it becomes increasingly apparent that the authorities are aware of Kelly-Ann’s online exploits (or is that merely her paranoia…?), Kelly-Ann places bid after bid on the video, even running a high-stakes poker game at the same time in order to raise extra cash. Winning the auction at the last second, Kelly-Ann finally has access to that third video file, which she copies to a flash drive and then leaves in the home of one of the victim’s parents.
It’s often said, in reviews and articles about Red Rooms, that its final stretch is ambiguous – and it’s certainly true that Plante doesn’t spell out exactly what Kelly-Ann’s thinking in its third act. The film’s literary allusions, however, might provide a clearer picture of what is going on in the protagonist’s head.
In her online interactions, Kelly-Ann’s handle is a variation on The Lady of Shalott – the poet Alfred Tennyson’s poem based on Arthurian legend. The parallels between Kelly-Ann and the noblewoman in that story are fascinating: like Kelly-Ann, the Lady of Shalott lives in solitude in a tower. Afflicted by a curse, she’s forbidden from looking out of her own window, and must instead sit with her back to it and observe the world passing by through a mirror.
The curse also requires that she sit and weave images all day long – another bit of busywork that prevents her from connecting with everyday reality. Eventually, the Lady of Shalott breaks the rules when she sees the handsome knight Lancelot ride by one day; spotting him in the mirror, the woman turns and looks out of the window, condemning her to death.
Red Rooms as a whole is like a twisted form of the same tale – the portrait of a person isolated from the real world and tangled in the worst corners of the dark web. In some early renderings of Arthurian legend, Lancelot was known as Chevalier Blanc, or the White Knight. In other words, the killer Ludovic Chevalier is Red Rooms’ bleak rendering of Lancelot (Ludovic can be translated to ‘famous fighter’ – ironic, given the cowardly nature of his crimes), whose appearance online has damned Kelly-Ann before the movie has even begun.
As Kelly-Ann’s infatuation reaches its zenith, Plante stages an incredible courtroom scene in which she furtively puts on a school uniform and contact lenses – turning herself into a ghastly facsimile of the killer’s victims. At first, we might charitably think she’s done this to try to force a reaction from Chevalier, who’s sat impassively through the hearings so far. But then we might start to wonder: does Kelly-Ann fantasise about being one of the killer’s victims? Is that what she’s thinking as she sits and watches those videos?
That Kelly-Ann, again dressed in her school girl outfit, takes a selfie of herself in the victim’s bedroom certainly underlines that interpretation. And as you can see in our interview with Plante, the filmmaker himself describes his protagonist as being ‘on the sociopathic end of the spectrum’ and a sufferer of ‘hybristophilia’ – a person who’s ‘turned on by horrible crimes.’
Red Rooms ends with Chevalier being convicted for his crimes – the flash drive containing the video being the final, incriminating piece of evidence required to secure his conviction. Kelly-Ann’s fate is less clear-cut, though given that the Lady of Shalott was eventually found dead, floating in a boat up a river, suggests that she won’t live happily ever after.
In what has been a decent year for thrillers, Red Rooms is surely a standout – an intelligent, suspenseful film about a particularly modern kind of obsession.
