A woman’s hunt for the truth takes a horrifying turn in Pascal Plante’s unflinching courtroom thriller. Here’s our Red Rooms review.
If making good films about specifically 21st century experiences was easy, everyone would be doing it.
Plenty of what separates the 2010s and 2020s from any other period doesn’t feel right for the big screen. It’s hard to create jeopardy when everyone in a thriller has a phone in their pocket. It’s hard to set up a meet cute when (appreciating this may be the most old-man sentence I ever type) people spend so much time on their damn screens.
Two decades into the social media revolution, however, it seems that cinema is finally catching up. Pascal Plante’s French-language Canadian thriller, Red Rooms, takes aim at the modern cultural phenomena which has already inspired plenty of comedy and drama writers looking for a quick hook: true crime. It’s safe to say it isn’t much of a fan.
We first meet Kelly-Anne, Juliette Gariépy’s curiously emotionless protagonist, sleeping in a doorway outside a Québécois courthouse. As we discover later, she doesn’t need to. She’s “good with numbers”, apparently, and spends her time between lucrative modelling gigs playing online poker – and winning. Her sleek studio apartment boasts a magnificent view of the city she rarely sees, fixated as she is on her elaborate PC setup against the opposite wall.
No, Kelly-Anne is sleeping outdoors in the Canadian winter because she’s in a queue. A high-profile court case finds a man accused of filming the torture and murder of three teenage girls, selling the footage to the highest bidder on the dark web. In the interest of open justice, the small, modern courtroom allows a few members of the public in each day. Sitting beside the grieving families of the victims, Kelly-Anne seems convinced she can solve this case – that something in the months-long investigation and subsequent trial has been missed.
She’s joined in her queue of two by Clémentine (Laurie Babin), a vulnerable young woman convinced that the killer is innocent. The pair strike up a friendship, united by their fascination with a case which doesn’t seem to affect them emotionally in the same way it hits everybody else. As the trial progresses, the lengths they go to to involve themselves in proceedings only get more extreme.
It’s a deep dive into the mind state of a specifically 21st century sociopath. Director Pascal Plante’s use of long takes and a refusal to avoid genuinely horrific subject matter subverts any accusations of hypocrisy. Though the jury are shown footage of the killer’s crimes throughout the trial, our own curiosity is left unsated. What we do see are their reactions – a courtroom full of people who acknowledge the horrible sincerity of what they are there to accomplish. Behind them all, two women silently scoff as the prosecution piles on evidence they’ve convinced themselves is false.
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In Kelly-Anne, Gariépy has crafted a protagonist every bit as disturbing as Travis Bickle or Patrick Bateman, and like them, she’s only more terrifying because we can see her flaws all around us. A genuinely horrible portrait of self-obsession and conspiracy rolled into a single character, the glimmers of empathy she shows only make her descent into darkness all the more compelling. At times we can almost convince ourselves that she’s doing what she does for the right reasons; we can say she’s not as completely delusional as Clémentine; that she buys her new friend a salad and a squash racquet; that she’s smart, articulate and takes care of herself. It all only makes things worse.
But then Red Rooms feels like so much more than a true crime-bashing hit piece. In many ways, it examines a societal phenomenon as old as any other – the same one which turned gladiatorial combat and public executions into a form of entertainment. It’s a stunning critique of the human desire to slow down to look at a car crash. That it feels like a film which so specifically tackles our fears of the 21st century says something all on its own.
Red Rooms is in cinemas 6th September.
